How Therapy Can Help with Anxiety
Anxiety. It can be extremely impactful on someones life, career and relationships. If you are trying to "power through" your anxiety, please consider therapy. You may be resilient, but in the long term are doing more harm than good? Understanding the source of the anxiety, how it developed and what it needs is a path to working through it. While it may never fully disappear, it doesn't have to take over your life.
How does your anxiety present?
Ruminating thoughts that keep you distracted, awake until early hours of the morning or even cause anxiety of panic attacks.
Feeling constantly unsettled, things feel off or you are waiting for the other shoe to drop
Constantly thinking about every possible scenario so you can be prepared for anything that happens
Restless or fidgety
Afraid to go into social situations, a business meeting or have an uncomfortable conversation
Your body is tense, shoulders are tight, jaw may be clenched, tightness in your chest, can't take deep breaths
Frequently seeing things from the perspective of "what's the worst that can happen" and barely seeing possibility or opportunity
Around people that make you feel uncomfortable, confrontational, abusive or aggressive
Find yourself in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode often
How can therapy help you feel better? There are many tools, techniques, skills and possibilities on how to approach anxiety and one size does not fit all. It will depend on what you are feeling and the degree to which it's impacting your life. So keeping that in mind, here are some reasons why therapy may be a great resource for you.
Working with a therapist can help you identify the root causes of their anxiety. Putting a face on anxieties can help you understand why they have evolved, what keeps them fueled and teaches you how to observe yourself. Anxiety is often linked to uncertainty. Realistic fears may be at play, but there could also be false fears. It is valuable to check in with what is real, what is uncertain, what is realistic and what is based in experiences.
Therapy can offer insight into survival anxieties and you can learn to deal with threats. Anxiety can come in clusters, and this makes a bad situation feel worse. You can dread something, avoid situations, dweel on your anxiety or get stuck in fight, flight or freeze. A therapist can help decrease anxiety complications in a few ways:
Explore faulty expectations
Decrease magnification so that you don't dramatize every possible danger
Work to relieve helpless or powerless thinking, break the destructive pattern and feel more freedon
Support you in feeling the feelings. Instead of feeling dread, frustration, afraid or uncomfortable you can learn to navigate the feelings in a more manageable way.
When speaking to a therapist there are behavioral methods to help with worry vs. anxiety. Worry and anxiety share the same space in the mind and brain but also have separate places. Exploring these differences like catastrophic thinking, avoidance, could be thinking or the what if trap. Therapy for anxiety can explore each of these independently to foster understanding and change.
You and your therapist can find approaches to overcome phobias. This could include:
Start with a meaningful and reasonable goal about something you would like to do.
Set up a hierarchy to identify mild, moderate or severe fears then work with the list when you are doing things that cause anxiety.
Practice relaxation techniques for the mind and body.
Create coping statements for each step and develop a self efficacy belief such as "I can...."
The hope is that you can learn to prevent anxiety and fear from coming back. With a little perspective, you can see that you have cognitive, emotive, and behavioral tools to assert control over new and older anxieties. During the work you can learn how to break anxiety into smaller pieces, parts that you can engage with and think about one thing at a time. Sometimes it's the overwhelm "of it all" that continually feels unapproachable.
Reaching out for support isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you—it’s a meaningful step toward feeling more like yourself again. With the right support, anxiety can become something you understand and manage, rather than something that manages you. If you’re ready for a change, therapy can be the beginning of that journey.
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