Weekly workshop provides anxiety management strategies

Students wrapped up in the stresses of college may want to consider adding another course to their schedule: Anxiety 101.

The course isn’t academic. It’s a workshop hosted by Counseling and Psychological Services that aims to teach students how to identify their sources of anxiety, understand their emotions and manage their stress in healthy ways.

Anxiety 101 started in the middle of the fall semester. It consists of three sessions over three weeks. Sessions meet Thursdays in the Student Union from 5 to 6 p.m.

Wendy Kadens, a clinical social worker at CAPS, runs Anxiety 101. She said the workshop offers students a chance to learn about anxiety in a low-stress, educational environment instead of in individual therapy sessions.

“It came about as a response to some students who come in and just don’t have a lot of experience with anxiety or understand it’s very normal and reasonable,” she said.

According to a national report by the Jed Foundation, 50 percent of first-year college students said they felt stressed all or most of the time. And 36 percent of first-years said they did not feel in control of the day-to-day stresses of college life.

Kadens said anxiety is the top reason students seek counseling.

“College can be a challenge, and we just want to give people more information on how to work with that,” she said.

Anxiety 101’s workshops teach the importance of understanding anxiety as a normal human response, Kadens said.

Jonathan Abramowitz, associate chairperson of the psychology department, said human survival is due, in part, to anxiety.

“We need this,” he said. “Human beings would not survive without this wonderful fight-or-flight response when we perceive threat.”

Abramowitz runs the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic on campus, which studies the nature of anxiety and anxiety disorders and their treatments, including various therapies.

Though therapy is effective in treating anxiety, most people who have anxiety — a demographic constituting 20 to 25 percent of the population — never receive the treatment they need, Abramowitz said.

“They might be too embarrassed to ask for help or they don’t go to the right places, they don’t get good advice from doctors, things like that,” he said.

Kadens said it’s important to recognize that anxiety occurs in a variety of forms and levels, and treatment varies accordingly, but students can take small steps to alleviate some everyday stress. Deep breathing and mindfulness exercises, like those practiced in Anxiety 101, go a long way toward helping students, she said.

“The more we understand and learn to be mindful of normal triggers for anxiety makes it less debilitating.”

university@dailytarheel.com