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
member. This is an example of displacement, another defensive mechanism. That person might be stressed out because of their boss, and they take out their anger on a spouse because they feel less threatened by them. Another defensive mechanism against anxiety is denial. This is the act of completely ignoring and forgetting bad images and thoughts. Being in denial does not help people deal will stress well, but this will be explained later. Another type of a defensive mechanism is when a person acts similar to themselves from a previous point in their life.
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
actions. Another form of a defense mechanism is called projection. This is when a person’s ego is feeling anxiety, and makes the person project their own emotions on to someone else. Suppose there is a man and a women in a relationship. If the man cheats on the women, he might then believe that his girlfriend is cheating on him. He projected his emotions onto her to make himself feel better about what he did. The last form of a defense mechanism is sublimation. Sublimation is when a person takes their impulses and turns it into a different or easier objective. If someone got angry they could turn their anger into something else. That person could go to a gym or go to a boxing ring. They could take their anger out by working out harder or practicing by hitting punching bags. Then there anger might disappear and nobody got hurt because of it.