I have been asked to do obt for my anxiety. I fear silence, closed spaces and when people are around me My stomach starts growling and my heart starts pounding. What can I do to help such situations?

With reference to the problem mentioned above you are neither comfortable alone and nor with people. You want to be with people but when they are with you you feel uncomfortable. May be their is lack of confidence of dealing with them. You can take long breaths counting backwards from 10 to 1. Condition your brain by telling it that you are very comfortable. Imagine yourself with people and practice talking to them. You can do this with the help of family members. Need to go into more detail. May be there is some incident happened in past with you or someone very close which make you uncomfortable in such situations.

More than anxiety, I think you are developing phobia and having hysterical reactions too. These are all fear based and as such if you work with a counselor to address the fear a lot can be resolved. These are examples of normal fear becoming abnormal due to the neglect of fear itself. Fear is good and is extremely useful to exercise caution where necessary. Somewhere and somehow you have been denying the fear and it has over a period of time developed into phobia. It is also possible that in childhood you may have had some traumatic experience and that has led to this abnormal response to fear today. Meet with a counselor and deal with your emotions to deal with the underlying causes. In the meantime, you can learn to de-condition yourself off of the phobia by frequenting these places with a therapist and gradually working out through the experience the various reactions that you will go through. Over time you will find that your phobia is unfounded and learn to develop normal responses to these situations. Vigorous exercise, especially of the callisthenic kind, will make your heart, which is a muscle, grow larger; and then your heart will need to beat less often and you will respond to the phobia with a calmer disposition. This will give you an undue advantage over the phobia to perhaps bring it into the normal realm of fear. That, you can then tackle with aplomb.