Anxiety Therapy
Is Anxiety Affecting How You Feel About Yourself?
Do you constantly worry, overthink, and ruminate over the stressors of life? Has a lack of focus and trouble concentrating started to impact your performance at work or school? Are you racked by feelings of guilt or shame that affect your self-esteem and make social situations agonizing?
When anxiety strikes, the symptoms are unmistakable. You might experience a pounding heart, sweaty palms, or a churning stomach, perhaps even suffer occasional panic attacks. Or maybe you have trouble sleeping as your mind races with intrusive thoughts that fill you with panic or dread. To escape your discomfort, you might try to distract yourself by working too much, scrolling through your phone, or using substances to numb out.
Anxiety Can Affect How You Feel Around Others
If you suffer from social anxiety, constant second-guessing on your part might lead you to worry about what you may have said to offend someone. Perhaps you actively avoid social situations, canceling plans in favor of being alone. Or maybe you fall into people-pleasing behavior and overlook healthy boundaries to keep the peace. You might have a hard time saying no, which lowers your self-confidence and causes you to put others’ needs in front of your own.
Anxiety can make you more defensive with your partner and lead to more arguments and discord. And if you’re a parent, you might lack patience with your kids or be overly worried about their well-being. Left unchecked, anxiety leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of each day, and yet you can’t sleep.
If only you could find confidence in yourself and not worry so much about what other people thought, you could relax more. Luckily, therapy can help guide you to tangible solutions for managing anxiety.
Anxiety Disorders Affect Nearly 1 In 5 People
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health condition in the United States, affecting 19.1 percent of adults in the past year.¹ And although many of us suffer the debilitating symptoms of an anxiety disorder, it is estimated that only 43.2 percent of sufferers receive treatment.² Part of the reason might be that we understand it’s normal to experience anxiety sometimes. Anxiety can indeed be helpful in situations when we are under threat and need to respond quickly. However, when anxiety becomes dysfunctional, we suffer.
Anxiety Kicks In Whenever We Perceive A Threat
Within our nervous system, each of us has a fight-or-flight response that activates whenever we perceive a threat. It’s what prompts us to slam on the brakes in a split second to avoid hitting the car in front of us. However, our bodies can’t always discern between a real threat and a perceived threat. And therein lies the problem.
The stressors of modern life can lead to overstimulation, which, in turn, can cause our body to activate its fight-or-flight response. Even scrolling through Instagram or watching the news has the potential to trigger a surge of adrenaline. If we don’t purge the stress chemicals our body produces through movement or exercise, they can get stuck in our nervous system, leading to physical and emotional symptoms.
But rather than exploring the root of our anxiety, we often use distractions, such as our phones, food, or substances, to numb ourselves. Or we tend to worry and overthink about a potential problem rather than take action. In this way, we normalize anxiety, not realizing there are healthier ways to cope.
But the good news is seeking treatment for anxiety can help you better understand the way your body reacts to stress and provide you with effective strategies for managing its symptoms.
Therapy Can Teach You How To Manage Anxiety Within A Finite Time Frame
What usually stands in the way of feeling better is our fear of facing fear. Therapy offers a protected space to explore these fears within a safe “container”. Each session provides the opportunity to learn new tools to challenge anxiety and suggestions for how to utilize these newfound tools outside of therapy.
Your therapist will challenge you with kindness and compassion. By cultivating a judgment-free zone where all thoughts are evaluated equally, your anxiety counselor will be your greatest cheerleader, advocate, and guide. All it takes on your part is a willingness to do the work. And within 8 to 10 sessions, we aim to equip you to become your own therapist and fiercest advocate.
What To Expect In Sessions
In our initial session, your therapist will assess any contributing biological, psychological or social factors that contribute to your anxiety. Working together, you will identify both short- and long-term goals for therapy. In the fifth or sixth session, we will assess what progress you’ve made so far and make any necessary adjustments. And at the end of treatment, we will reassess your goals to ensure that your anxiety symptoms have subsided to your satisfaction.
Once we identify the problem—whether it’s panic attacks, social anxiety, people-pleasing, or sleeplessness—we will utilize brief, solution-oriented treatment to address the problem. By teaching you tangible skills, you can expect to notice a reduction in symptoms within three to four sessions. If, for example, people-pleasing is an issue, therapy can help you set healthy boundaries with others. You might also be given homework so you can apply what you’ve learned to real-life situations.
Through psychoeducation, you will learn the role anxiety plays to keep you safe and how your body commonly misperceives what constitutes a threat, leading to disordered anxiety. With a clearer understanding of how healthy anxiety works, you will appreciate its function while being able to discern the times when worry and overthinking are not serving you.
The Modalities We Use
Our therapists draw from various modalities for anxiety treatment, but we specialize in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Gottman Method relationship tools while also incorporating Brené Brown’s teachings about trust and vulnerability. CBT explores the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Although feelings can’t be controlled, by shifting away from unhelpful thoughts you can change behaviors which can lead to more compassion for yourself and build self-esteem.
Helping you recognize Gottman’s Four Horsemen of poor communication—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—can aid in improving communication with your partner.³ Avoiding conflict with your partner helps prevent the anxiety that follows. And by building intense trust within yourself, you can cultivate self-confidence while diminishing anxiety. Additionally, you will learn self-soothing techniques that foster healthy emotional regulation.
When you commit to therapy, within 8-10 sessions you can expect to see drastic improvements in your anxiety symptoms. Imagine feeling confident and calm as you navigate the challenges of life.
But You May Wonder Whether Anxiety Therapy Is Right For You…
Anxiety therapy is an investment in what matters most in the long run—your well-being. Because it’s so important that you feel better, we do our best to help make therapy feasible for your budget. We can provide superbills to your insurance provider to determine what reimbursement you may be eligible for as well as space out sessions with your anxiety counselor.
What’s more, our goal is to teach you everything we know about managing anxiety within a finite timeframe so that you can become your own therapist. This way, therapy stays affordable and time-efficient.
You should never feel as though you’re stuck with treatment that isn’t helping you. We will always welcome and encourage your feedback; it’s how we fine-tune your anxiety treatment to ensure we are meeting your needs. And if for some reason your therapist cannot meet your needs, we will find someone who can. We want to facilitate a healthy relationship between you and your therapist since it’s a critically important component of successful therapy.
Perhaps this “all or nothing” belief you have is a symptom of anxiety that therapy can address. The narrative you’ve adopted perpetuates the false belief that your essential self is fused to anxiety. But this isn’t true. Part of you knows that something isn’t right, and your coping mechanisms are no longer helping you how they once did. You weren’t born this way. Anxiety therapy can help free you from this belief and find beneficial ways to change your thinking.
Anxiety Symptoms Can Be Reduced With Short-Term Treatment
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