In the case of such overwhelming anxiety, people are not making good decisions. People start avoiding things, or they are unable to rise to the occasion because the anxiety is too much. They are procrastinating because they cannot concentrate, can't stay focused. It's really interfering with the clients day-to-day life.  What are the signs and symptoms of Anxiety ? 
A person with anxiety may:

• Worry very much about everyday things
• Have trouble controlling their constant worries
• Know that they worry much more than they should
• Not be able to relax
• Have a hard time concentrating
• Be easily startled
• Have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep
• Feel tired all the time
• Have headaches, muscle aches, stomach aches, or unexplained pains
• Have a hard time swallowing
• Tremble or twitch
• Be irritable, sweat a lot, and feel light-headed or out of breath
• Have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Anxiety sometimes runs in families, but no one knows for sure why some people have it, while others don't. Researchers have found that several parts of the brain are involved in fear and anxiety. Learning more about your fear and anxiety which is produced in the brain, you may be able to create better a better therapeutic environment and treatment for yourself. Also, we need to look at ways in which stress and environmental factors may play a negative role in your life.

A type of psychotherapy called cognitive behavior therapy is especially useful for treating people with anxiety. It teaches a person different ways of thinking, behaving, and reacting to situations that help him or her feel less anxious and worried.  Homework given by the therapist and followed by the client is most beneficial in helping to render a positive outcome in dealing with the anxiety.

When anxiety is taking a toll, your body knows it. You have trouble sleeping, eating, and concentrating. You get headaches; your stomach is upset. You might even have a panic attack -- the pounding heart, a feeling of lightheadedness.  Anxiety may also feel like depression; the two sometimes overlap.  When anxiety becomes so overwhelming that it interferes with day-to-day activities -- when it keeps you from going places, from doing things you need to do -- that's when you need help and you should see a therapist, psychologist, or medical doctor.

We all spend too much time worrying about things that will never really materialize. And this worry only makes our lives unnecessarily complicated and painful. However there is hope. By listening to your therapist, by implementing the strategies presented, each of us can diminish our worries and anxieties, and thereby become freer to enjoy life and to relish in its potential.

Delay Worrying  This is a simple technique to stop our worries. If you find yourself concerned over a situation in the future, you can try telling yourself, “let me worry about this tomorrow; there is no need to worry about it today because it won’t happen for quite a while anyway”. Whenever the problem comes to your mind, just try this technique – delay worrying for another day. The fact is that most worries never occur; delaying them is just a clever way of dealing with our negative mind. The nature of our mind is to create problems and things to worry about, but this is a way to forget about them. If you keep ignoring your worries you may later realize they are not going to occur anyway.

Take Action When we worry about things we can become paralysed by fear. Rather than just worrying, think very carefully about what practical steps you can take to avoid the problem. For example, if you worry about your finances consider how you could reduce your spending, increase your income and consolidate your debt.

If you just worry and feel powerless the problem will not go away, but will continue to lurk in the back of your mind. By taking action and working towards a resolution you will feel much better. Some problems shouldn’t be ignored, they require action; however, for other worries there are no steps that you can take because the worry is mostly imaginary. If you realize there is nothing you can actually do, this is a very good reason to stop worrying about it.

Be Careful  When we think about something intensely we give this idea greater power. In some form these ideas are more likely to materialize. If we worry over making a mistake, we can increase our chances of doing this. We therefore need to be careful what we think about; if we worry over a negative outcome we increase the chance that it will occur – Our worries can become self fulfilling. If we remember the power of thought, we will be more careful about dwelling on painful outcomes. Rather than worrying about a negative event, focus your attention on how difficult situations could be resolved and think how you would successfully deal with the problem.

Keep Things in Perspective  Try writing a list of all the things that you are currently worried about, then examine how much they really effect your life. Are you worrying about important things in life or merely side issues? If your worries are insignificant issues then give them the importance they deserve.- If you don’t get a certain parking space in the morning it is not the end of the world. If a child forgets to turn a light out, it is not a big deal. Don’t be overwhelmed by small things – try to see the bigger picture.

Control Your Thoughts  The key to reducing anxiety and worry is learning the ability to control your thoughts. Sometimes we feel powerless over our own thoughts; it is as if we are slave to them. Whatever thoughts may come we identify with them and accept them as true. However, this is a big mistake. Our own thoughts are often wrong. Also we do have the ability to decide which thoughts to pursue and which thoughts to reject; if we are determined we can prevent thoughts taking hold and throw them out of our mind. If we give importance to controlling our own mind we will be less subject to pursuing endless worries and anxieties.

Don’t Be Vain  It might be harsh, but alas true, that we often worry about what people think of us. We worry endlessly that we might not meet society’s expectations; we worry about whether people will like us. With this mental outlook we start to give too much importance to our ego; it means we are constantly looking for appreciation and the admiration of others. If we don’t get this appreciation, we start to worry that we are no good. If we can develop greater self confidence and inner poise, then we will not worry about what others believe or think.

We need to give less importance to the opinions of the world. Even if we get criticized, we should not worry because we should not identify our self worth with the opinions of others. This is not easy to do overnight, but, if we can detach ourselves from judgements of others we will gain greater inner peace and avoid worrying over the relatively insignificance of people’s judgements.

Analyze Them  Another approach to dealing with worries is to carefully analyze whether they are actually justified. Ask yourself why am I worrying about this? Could I be wrong? Suppose you are worrying about someone’s reaction to what you did at work; it is likely that you are imagining the worse and assigning false motives to the other person. If nothing else you can sow a seed of doubt in the reason for your anxiety. Before, you felt it was 100% certain to occur, but, on reflection you have to admit it is perhaps only 50% true. By analyzing and stepping back from the problem you can evaluate it’s importance and this is an effective way to diminish the power of our worries.

There are always things to worry about, but, as it has often been said, worrying is not going to help. Either take practical steps to deal with the problem or don’t waste your time worrying about unnecessary things. If you keep ignoring worries, eventually they will go away. The key is to live in the present moment; when we worry we are thinking of the future or past and this prevents us from enjoying the present moment. To reduce worries and anxieties is not to ignore problems – it means we work toward solutions rather than just thinking of bad outcomes.


Information From :
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/stop-worrying-7-effective-strategies-for-dealing-with-anxiety/
and
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad/index.shtml

Laura's boss has just announced that the company has just won a bid to create a national marketing campaign. And he is hinting that he wants Laura to head this project. All that she has to do is let him know that she's interested by the following Friday.

Laura always hoped for an opportunity like this. She knows her work and management skills qualify her for the job – and she knows that it would likely lead to a promotion, or at least to some much-deserved recognition. However, by the time Friday arrives, she's created a list of reasons not to head the project. And by the end of the day, she still hasn't talked to her boss.

Does this situation sound familiar?

Fear of success is actually quite common, and it can cause us to lose out on a lot of opportunities in life. When we're too afraid to take risks and move forward on our goals – either consciously or unconsciously – we get stuck in one place, neither moving forward nor backward.  In this article, we'll examine the fear of success: what it is, how to know if you have it, and what you can do to overcome it.

Fear of Success Psychologist Matina Horner first diagnosed the fear of success in the early 1970s. Her findings, especially as they related to fear of success in women at that time, were incredibly controversial. Since then, however, most scientists and psychologists agree that fear of success exists for both men and women.

Fear of success is similar to fear of failure. They have many of the same symptoms, and both fears hold you back from achieving your dreams and goals.  Signs of Fear of Success The biggest problem for many people is that their fear of success is largely unconscious. They just don't realize that they've been holding themselves back from doing something great.

If you experience the following thoughts or fears, you might have a fear of success on some level:

• You feel guilty about any success you have, no matter how small, because your friends, family, or co-workers haven't had the same success.
• You don't tell others about your accomplishments.
• You avoid or procrastinate on big projects, especially projects that could lead to recognition.
• You frequently compromise your own goals or agenda to avoid conflict in a group, or even conflict within your family.
• You self-sabotage your work or dreams by convincing yourself that you're not good enough to achieve them.
• You feel, subconsciously, that you don't deserve to enjoy success in your life.
• You believe that if you do achieve success, you won't be able to sustain it. Eventually you'll fail, and end up backing a worse place from where you started. So you think, "why bother?"

Causes of Fear of Success Fear of success has several possible causes:

• We fear what success will bring – for example, loneliness, new enemies, being isolated from our family, longer working hours, or being asked for favors or money.
• We're afraid that the higher we climb in life, the further we're going to fall when we make a mistake.
• We fear the added work, responsibilities, or criticism that we'll face.
• We fear that our relationships will suffer if we become successful. Our friends and family will react with jealousy and cynicism, and we'll lose the ones we love.
• We fear that accomplishing our goals, and realizing that we have the power to be successful, may actually cause an intense regret that we didn't act sooner.

Overcoming Fear of Success You can use several different strategies to overcome your fear of success. The good news is that the more you face your fears, bring them to the surface, and analyze them rationally, the more you're likely to weaken those fears – and dramatically reduce your reluctance to achieve your goals.

Take a realistic look at what will happen if you succeed with your goal. Don't look at what you hope will happen, or what you fear will happen. Instead, look at what is likely to happen.  It's important not to give a quick answer to this. Take at least 15 minutes to examine the issues, and write down your answers to questions like these:

• How will my friends and family react if I accomplish this goal?
• How will my life change?
• What's the worst that could happen if I achieve this goal?
• What's the best that could happen?
• Why do I feel that I don't deserve to accomplish this goal?
• How motivated am I to work toward this goal?
• What am I currently doing to sabotage, or hurt, my own efforts?
• How can I stop those self-sabotaging behaviors?

Another useful technique is to address your fears directly, and then develop a backup plan that will overcome your concern.

For instance, suppose you don't push yourself to achieve a promotion, and the biggest reason is because you secretly fear that the additional income and recognition would jeopardize your family relationships and your integrity. You're worried that you would be so busy working to maintain your success that you'd never see your family, and you might be forced to make choices that would destroy your integrity.

To overcome these fears, start by addressing your workload. You could set a rule for yourself that you'll always be home by 7 p.m. You could tell this to your boss if you're offered the new position.  For issues involving integrity, you always have a choice. If you set maintaining your integrity as your top goal, then you'll always make the right choice.  By creating backup plans that address your fears, you can often eliminate those fears entirely.

Tip:
Sometimes people will react negatively to your success, particularly if they've been perceived as being more successful in the past. If people are this small-minded, and they can't rejoice in their friends' success, do you really want to know them?

Key Points Fear of success is common, but many of us don't realize that we have it. Self-sabotaging activities – such as procrastination, negative self-talk, and fearing what the success will bring – may hold us back from achieving our goals and dreams.

If you think that you have a fear of success, identify why you're afraid of accomplishing your goals. The more you face your fear, and analyze the reason for having the fear, the better able you'll be to overcome the fear and move forward in your life.

Information from :
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/fear-of-success.htm#np

Sleep deprivation, while euphoria-inducing, can hamper your judgment. But not getting enough shut-eye can hurt your waistline too. People who don’t get adequate sleep consume around 300 extra calories a day compared with when they’re well-rested.

While scientists have long linked sleep deprivation with weight gain, the researchers from Columbia University are now able to provide more insight into the phenomenon. In a study of 26 men and women who regularly slept seven to nine hours a night, participants were split into two groups – one was able to sleep four hours a night for six nights, while the other slept nine hours a night.

Not only did the sleep-deprived group consume more calories than when they were adequately rested (an average of 329 extra calories a day for women and 263 extra for men), most of those calories came from high-fat foods, particularly ice cream. Women also ate an average of 31 extra grams of fat a day. Men’s fat intake did not increase by much.

Of course, you might be able to burn off some of those additional calories during your extra waking hours. But lounging on the couch watching late-night infomercials on television probably isn’t going to cut it. It takes walking about five kilometres at a moderate speed to burn roughly 225 calories. Biking the same distance can burn around 130. So, if the thought of doing that on four hours of sleep sounds exhausting, you’re probably better off just crawling into bed early.

Information from :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/sleep-deprived-people-eat-more-calories-study/article1955433/

We have all experienced that appalling sense of having far too much work to do and too little time to do it in. We can choose to ignore this, and work unreasonably long hours to stay on top of our workload. The alternative is to work more intelligently, by focusing on the things that are important for job success and reducing the time we spend on low priority tasks.  Job Analysis is the first step in doing this, and it's a key technique for managing job overload – an important source of stress.

To do an excellent job, you need to understand fully what is expected of you. While this may seem obvious, in the hurly-burly of a new, fast-moving, high-pressure role, it is oftentimes something that is easy to overlook.

By understanding the priorities in your job, and what constitutes success within it, you can focus on these activities and minimize work on other tasks as much as possible. This helps you get the greatest return from the work you do, and keep your workload under control.

Job Analysis is a useful technique for getting a firm grip on what really is important in your job so that you are able to perform excellently. It helps you to cut through clutter and distraction to get to the heart of what you need to do.

Note that there are two tools and it takes two forms – the short-form we discuss here assumes that your organization is already well organized and that its job descriptions, review criteria and incentives are well-aligned and correct. The long-form, helps you to deal with jobs where this is not the case – here, inconsistent job design can cause enormous stress.

Using the Tool "A" to conduct a Job Analysis, go through the following steps:

1. Review Formal Job Documentation

• Look at your job description. Identify the key objectives and priorities within it.
• Look at the forms for the periodic performance reviews. These show precisely the behaviors that will be rewarded and, by implication, show those that will be punished.
• Find out what training is available for the role. Ensure that you attend appropriate training so that you know as much as possible about what you need to know.
• Look at incentive schemes to understand the behaviors that these reward.

2. Understand the Organization's Strategy and Culture Your job exists for a reason – this will ultimately be determined by the strategy of the organizational unit you work for. This strategy is often expressed in a mission statement. In some way, what you do should help the organization achieve its mission (if it does not, you have to ask yourself how secure the job is!). Make sure you understand and perform well the tasks that contribute to the strategy.

Similarly, every organization has its own culture – its own, historically developed values, rights and wrongs, and things that it considers to be important. If you are new to an organization, talk through with established, respected members of staff to understand these values.

Make sure that you understand this culture. Make sure that your actions reinforce the company's culture, or at least do not go against it. Looked at through the lens of culture, will the company value what you do?

* Check that your priorities are consistent with this mission statement and the company culture.

3. Find Out : Who the Top Achievers are, and Understand Why They are Successful inside or outside the organization, there may be people in a similar role to you who are seen as highly successful. Find out how they work, and what they do to generate this success. Look at what they do, and learn from them. Understand what skills make them successful, and learn those skills.

4. Check You Have the People and Resources to do the Job. The next step is to check that you have the staff support, resources and training needed to do an excellent job. If you do not, start work on obtaining them.

5. Confirm Priorities With Your Boss. By this stage, you should have a thorough understanding of what your job entails, and what your key objectives are. You should also have a good idea of the resources that you need, and any additional training you may need to do the best you can.

* This is the time to talk the job through with your boss, and confirm that you share an understanding of what constitutes good performance in the role.  It is also worth talking through serious inconsistencies, and agreeing how these can be managed.

6. Take Action : You should now know what you have to do to be successful in your job. You should have a good idea of the most important things that you have to do, and also the least important.  Where you can drop the less-important tasks, do so. Where you can de-prioritize them, do so.  Where you need more resource or training to do your job, negotiate for this.

Remember to be a little sensitive in the way you do this: Good teamwork often means helping other people out with jobs that do not benefit you. However, do not let people take advantage of you: Be assertive in explaining that you have your own work to do. If you cannot drop tasks, delegate them or negotiate longer time scales.

Key Points : Job analysis is a five-step technique for:

• Understanding and agreeing how to achieve peak performance in your job.
• Ensuring that you and your boss agree on the areas you should concentrate on when time gets tight; and the areas that can be de-emphasized during this time.
• Making sure that you have the resources, training and staff needed to do a good job.

By using the Job Analysis technique, you should gain a good understanding of how you can excel at your job. You should also understand your job priorities.  This helps you to manage the stress of job overload by helping to decide which jobs you should drop.

Job Analysis is just one of many practical action-oriented techniques for reducing the stress of job overload. These and other types of technique help you to resolve structural problems within jobs, work more effectively with your boss and powerful people, improve the way your teams function and become more assertive so that other people respect your right not to take on an excessive workload. These are all important techniques for bringing job stress under control, for improving the quality of your working life, and for achieving career success.

Information from :
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_02.htm#np