“Does anxiety go away if you ignore it?”

Ignoring anxiety might provide temporary relief from symptoms because it distracts you from the immediate feelings of anxiety. However, this approach is generally not effective for long-term management. Anxiety can stem from a variety of sources, including genetic predispositions, learned behaviors, and life stresses. When ignored, the underlying causes of anxiety remain unaddressed, which can lead to worsening symptoms over time.

For many, addressing and managing anxiety involves a combination of strategies, including:

Therapy: Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is particularly effective for anxiety disorders. It helps individuals identify and challenge negative thought patterns and behaviors that contribute to anxiety.

Medication: In some cases, medication may be prescribed to help manage symptoms, especially if they're severe.

Lifestyle Adjustments: Incorporating regular physical activity, maintaining a healthy diet, ensuring adequate sleep, and practicing relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or meditation can help reduce anxiety symptoms.

Support Networks: Sharing your experiences with friends, family, or support groups can provide comfort and advice on coping with anxiety.

It's important to confront anxiety rather than ignore it. Seeking help from a mental health professional can provide you with strategies tailored to your individual needs, helping you to manage your anxiety more effectively. If you're experiencing frequent anxiety attacks, consider reaching out.

This is one of the coping skill.

Avoiding anxiety and anxiety-provoking situations or triggers would sustain rather than increase the anxiety. The best strategy is to face it, deal with it and cope. Learn and practice coping skills like deep diaphragmatic breathing, mindfulness, and meditation.

Really brilliant question! Not clear of any studies that document one approach or another. Many times, however, distraction techniques from intense anxiety episodes that help ground an individual can be very very helpful. Because anxiety can really affect an individual both neurologically as well as from an outright emotional perspective, would strongly encourage talking with a therapist to find specific techniques that would be helpful for you personally. That certainly would help your quality of life. Sometimes medication may be especially helpful and that would require a psychiatric consultation. Finally, sometimes anxiety episodes are secondary to medical issues and a psychiatric consultation would help elucidate the actual cause of the anxiety.

Lance Steinberg MD, Inc.
Assistant Clinical Professor
UCLA (Geffen) NPI
1(818)224-3540

No

It would be best to address it because even if you ignore it, the things that cause your attacks will still be there and still cause anxiety.

If we consider ‘ignore’ as redirecting yourself then yes, it helps. Practicing mindfulness helps. Anxiety is something that is always be there depending on your stress level. The best treatment is learning how to deal with it.