Defensive Mechanisms Of Anxiety

Everyone in the entire world has different mechanism for dealing with anxiety. There are many strategies and things people do in order to reduce their anxiety. Each day people in the world get into situations where their anxiety might rise and their ego feels like it might lose control. The ego fights anxiety during these situations and uses different techniques in order to do so. The basic defensive mechanism against anxiety is repression. Repression automatically pushes conscious anxiety thoughts down so that people forget about them. When people are feeling stressed out at work or at home with their family, they might use some other defensive mechanisms to help out their stress. A person who is stressed out at work might come home and take out their anger on a family
This is known as regression. When a person crawls into the fetal position just because they are too stressed out, they are using regression. A person who is having a mental breakdown might also use regression to fight against the stress. People that act completely opposite to their ideals are using reaction formation, another type of a defensive mechanism. Suppose a person gets mad at their boss. When that person is feeling anxiety because of the way that their boss is treating them, they act extremely nice to their boss. Peoples’ egos also fight off anxiety by thinking about justifications for their actions. Once they think about the justifications, they believe that what they did is fine. This is known as rationalization. An example of rationalization could be that a student beat up another student in school. The student who beat up the other student could justify himself by saying that the student was a bully to other kids anyways. Once he thinks of this justification, the student believes what he did is completely fine, so that he will not feel any anxiety towards his