Anxiety Disorders: Nursing Diagnoses and Interventions (Nursing)

00:01 So what are our nursing interventions? We want to assist all of these patients to increase their awareness of when the feelings of anxiety first appear, in order to help them engage into a coping strategy.

00:19 We want to be able to facilitate and teach coping strategies so that the person can learn how to decrease some of their own anxiety.

00:30 We want to support our patients to explore healthy coping mechanisms that they can employ, that will help keep their anxiety at a manageable level.

00:43 We can't tell them what to do.

00:46 I can't say, "You know, you should be yawning five times every morning, because that's a really great way to start the day." I can say to my patients, "Why don't you try yawning and stretching and see if either of those help you?" And if the person says, "No, it didn't work for me." So well, let's start thinking about other ways that you could possibly reduce that anxiety.

01:12 We don't want to support maladaptive behaviors.

01:16 If they say, "If I had a drink in the afternoon." We know I said," Well then try that".

01:20 No.

01:22 We want to say, "Well, what's an alternative to drinking that might relax you?" How about running? How about walking? What are the outcomes that we're hoping to have once we have our nursing interventions? We want to make sure that our patients are able to verbalize a plan to manage their anxiety.

01:45 We want to be able to have the patient demonstrate how they are going to engage in that coping strategy.

01:55 If we are unable to have our patients have that awareness of their anxiety, that anxiety will always come up.

02:04 And...

02:06 I like to use the word hijack, it will hijack them, it will hijack their emotions, and they won't know which way is up or down.

02:15 So at that first sensation of this doesn't feel good.

02:20 You want that patient to say to you, "You know what? I'm starting to have that feeling." So that you can say, "Well, what would you like to do? Do you want to walk?" I have one patient who likes to sing whenever it starts happening.

02:34 And she happens to have a very nice voice.

02:36 And so she hums now, because that is very adaptive.

02:40 And people know, when she's humming, it doesn't bother them.

02:44 So what are our nursing diagnoses for the person with anxiety? Well, believe it or not anxiety is a nursing diagnosis.

02:56 And that would be our first thought.

02:59 If a person presents themselves with an anxiety disorder.

03:04 What is our intervention? We remain with the patient in that moment of anxiety, we establish a calm and supportive relationship.

03:13 And we assist that patient to explore coping strategies like breathing.

03:19 Once that the patient themselves will begin to use when we are there and when we are not there.

03:28 What do we hope the patient will experience, we hope that the patient will be able to identify that escalating anxiety early on and verbalize the ways that they can engage in coping strategies to reduce their anxiety.

03:45 And we want to help them, help them to engage in testing different coping strategies.

03:52 The same thing doesn't work for everyone.

04:00 Social isolation is another nursing diagnosis that might be related to the anxiety disorders.

04:08 We also see ineffective coping, ineffective impulse control.

04:14 These diagnoses again have to be related not so much to the diagnosis, but you're going to be relating it to the individual that you're taking care of.

04:25 You may have a person who doesn't have a social anxiety disorder, and they might not have social isolation.

04:37 Ineffective coping pretty much works for almost everyone who has an anxiety disorder.