Javier Álvarez: "Experiencing anxiety on a daily basis is useful and necessary".

Psychologist Javier Álvarez Cáceres talks to us about the importance of understanding anxiety.

Anxiety is a phenomenon that we associate with discomfort, discomfort and sometimes even despair.. It makes sense: it is one of the so-called negative emotions, to the point that many people suffer from real anxiety problems and attend psychotherapy to overcome them.

However, this psychological element does not exist for its own sake. Precisely, if it is so universal is precisely because although we do not realize it, in many occasions it helps us, it plays in our favor. This, among other things, is what our interviewee our interviewee of today, the psychologist Javier Álvarez Cáceres..

Interview with Javier Álvarez Cáceres: how does anxiety influence us?

Javier Álvarez Cáceres is a General Health Psychologist specialized in cognitive-behavioral therapy and with a practice in Malaga, where he treats individual patients, families and couples. In this interview we talk to him about one of the main reasons why people go to the psychologist: anxiety.

In what ways can experiencing anxiety help us in our daily lives?

Experiencing anxiety on a daily basis, besides being useful, is necessary. Anxiety is that which prepares us for the execution of a task or warns us of a danger.

Imagine performing any activity of daily life without a minimum of anxiety. When crossing a crosswalk, we would not be "alert" to any unforeseen event. At work, we would not be focused on good task performance. When driving, when taking an exam...

Not to mention anxiety in the face of danger. For example, in that crosswalk we mentioned earlier. If a driver did not see us and did not brake, anxiety would provoke a whole series of physiological responses that would prepare us for the danger, dilation of pupils, sweating to regulate temperature, hypervigilance, Muscle tension... In other words, our body prepares itself to run and avoid an accident.

What is it that causes anxiety, a resource that has evolved to help us survive, to generate an anxiety disorder?

There are three main groups. On the one hand, predisposing factors. Here we would include personality factors, biology and parenting styles.

Secondly, there are the triggering factors. Consumption of toxic substances and events in our life that provoke anxiety, we are not being able to manage it and it becomes dysfunctional? family crises, work crises, life crises, interpersonal conflicts...

Thirdly, there are the maintenance factors. Here are included the solutions that we have tried and have had no effect, which makes anxiety chronic.

As a maintenance factor it is important to highlight fear. Anxiety causes so much discomfort that it provokes fear of the repetition of the discomfort, that fear of the repetition of the sensations is what in many cases causes it to become a vicious circle.

As a psychologist, what aspects of the way of life of Western people do you think can often generate excessive anxiety?

That is a very good question, as people are used to treating anxiety once the discomfort is very high, but we do not realize that prevention is very important.

Pathological anxiety is an indicator that something is not going well in our lives, it appears little by little, "we do not listen to it" and the discomfort is increasing, we continue without listening to it and the discomfort continues to grow.

I believe that the pace of life we lead in the West is a "factory of anxiety"; we get up running, we get up with a certain level of anxiety, in many cases, we continue to accelerate during the day and we go to bed with our heads "full" of thoughts about the next day.

To manage anxiety it is important to take care of sleep, food, sport and social and family relationships, something that we increasingly neglect in Western culture.

Do you think that nowadays the fact of resigning oneself to suffer anxiety problems is very normalized in society?

More than resigning ourselves to suffer anxiety problems, what we are getting used to is not working on ourselves, not taking care of ourselves, not listening to our body and mind and seeing what is happening to us, what is causing us discomfort and anxiety.

Today, among the most sold medications in pharmacies are anxiolytics and antidepressants.

We live at such an accelerated pace of life that it is easier and more comfortable to take a pill than to work on ourselves.

What are the anxiety disorders you see in consultation?

The anxiety disorders I see most in consultation are panic attacks and anxiety caused by social, couple and family relationship problems.

Lately there has been a very significant increase due to COVID-19 of everything related to the decline in the work, social and family area.

At the same time, there has also been a greater increase in consultations related to hypochondria.

From your point of view, what are the most useful psychotherapy techniques to help people with anxiety problems?

From my point of view, cognitive-behavioral therapy is the therapeutic model that is most effective in addressing anxiety disorders.

In addition, a higher percentage of success is obtained by integrating techniques from other models, such as Acceptance and Commitment or systemic. When dealing with anxiety, it is necessary to intervene in three areas: The physiological, the cognitive and the behavioral.

In the physiological, we intervene on all physical symptomatology through relaxation techniques, visualization, breathing, normalization of symptoms...

In the cognitive part, we intervene on the thoughts associated with the anxiety process, distinguishing whether they are rational or irrational thoughts.

In the behavioral area we intervene from small exercises aimed at regaining control of our day to day, of our life.