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Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Most of us learn the alphabet as one of our first lessons in life. We then use this tool to build knowledge and communicate with the world around us.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have the same tools in everyday life, especially to deal with and recognize anxiety, a natural human emotion that protects us from danger. When anxiety strikes us, we fail to react positively due to lack of knowledge; We simply haven’t learned the ABCs of our anxiety!
ABCtracker™, which stands for Alarm, Belief, Coping, helps users identify and monitor It raises concern. Using the ABCs of Anxiety, you can take control of your uncomfortable feelings with the help of your doctor, psychologist, or other health care professional.
Every master starts as a beginner. Fortunately, ABCs are easy to learn and implement.
Alarms are an instinctive part of our makeup, alerting us (and our ancestors) to potential dangers or triggers. Just as a car alarm signals a threat, our bodies respond to imminent danger, whether real or merely perceived. Many of us with extremely uncomfortable anxiety have very sensitive alarm, and will respond quickly to situations that don’t actually pose much of a threat. By recognizing the alert your body is sending, you can begin to understand how anxiety triggers you.
The body does not stop alarming; The brain creates beliefs that complement the warning. When the alarm sounds, you immediately begin to assess the situation. Like a car owner, you can in a split second assess the actual danger of the situation that triggered your alarm.
Often, people with pervasive anxiety process this information automatically, forming an incorrect sense of reality, and causing anxiety. Thus, the beliefs actually reinforce anxious thoughts in people with anxiety disorders, making it difficult to calm alarm, and even encouraging false alarms. Since people are not always aware of these beliefs, worrying about them can actually trigger an alarm. By recognizing your beliefs, you can begin to accurately assess how true they are.
After your body processes the alarm, there is often an accompanying action – a Confrontation strategy. A coping strategy is any mechanism by which we deal with a threatening situation. Everyone has these things, as the conditioning stems from an instinctive desire to feel safe. Some coping strategies are good, in which case they are called adaptive, while other strategies are dysfunctional, and are called maladaptive.
Many anxiety sufferers develop maladaptive coping strategies that maintain or worsen their anxiety over time. One helpful way to identify and track your coping strategies is to use ABCtracker™. It can serve as your first step to developing positive, not harmful, coping techniques.