Anxiety Treatment

What to Expect in Treatment

Treatment is tailored individually, according to your lifestyle, goals, values, your anxiety, and what you need the most. You will learn these psychological flexibility skills to disrupt your anxiety cycle:

• •Become more open to painful internal experiences. Learn skills to get unstuck from them and allow them to come and go without getting caught in the anxiety trap.
• •Enhance your awareness so you can connect with the here and now and recognize that you are aware of being aware without having to become absorbed in avoidant behaviors to get rid of internal events (e.g., thoughts and feelings).
• •Become actively engaged in what is worth (values) your focus, time, and energy and choose to do what matters most in your life.

With the guidance of your therapist, you will develop specific and realistic goals related to what matters most so you can live with vitality even when anxiety shows up.

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Additional Information

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States affecting 40 million adults ages 18 and over. People with an anxiety disorder are three to five times more likely to go to the doctor, and six times more likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric disorders than those who do not suffer from anxiety disorders.*

Most likely you or someone close to you is struggling with anxiety. All of us will or have experienced anxiety at some point in our lives. For some people, it is a lifetime struggle.

Why is Anxiety so Pervasive?

The answers to this question will be provided in detail during treatment. However, let's briefly go over three concepts that individuals experiencing anxiety most commonly misunderstand.

Fighting Anxiety. When individuals experience anxiety, the fight-or-flight response is set in motion. This is the body's natural response for survival. When we struggle with anxiety, those feelings are magnified. Our inherent response is to try to get rid of unpleasant feelings and sensations immediately, but it doesn't work effectively.

Experiencing restlessness, fatigue, muscle tension, heart pounding, and shortness of breath, to name a few symptoms of anxiety, is not something we want to encounter on a regular basis. However, when we resist these sensations, our "alarm system" may detect that it's not doing its job. It sends the message to the other structures in our brain and body to work overtime.

Believing and doing what the mind says. Our mind provides us with thoughts, ideas and solutions to "help" us stay safe from possible danger. Here is a short silly story to illustrate this point. Once there was a man who lived by the mountains. He had heard there were man-eating bears on those mountains. He didn't like that idea, and somewhere he read that he could scare bears away by whistling. So he made it a habit to whistle every time he was outside doing chores.

Every time his friends came over to visit, they noticed he would always whistle when he was outside of the house. They finally asked him why he did that. He responded, "My whistling keeps man-eating bears away." His friends answered, "There are not any man-eating bears around." The man proudly responded, "Yup, it works. My whistling keeps them away."

You may say like this man's friends said, "This is silly." However, when individuals experience anxiety, they will do whatever they believe is helpful in order to keep anxiety away, even if to others seems silly or unhelpful.

Avoidance appears to be the best solution. When someone struggles with anxiety, their mind provides a myriad of solutions to avoid anything and anyone that could possible trigger their anxiety. Unfortunately, avoidance does not provide the result they wish to have - to get rid of their anxiety, as it keeps reoccurring. They also experience the pain of loneliness and missing out on life because they are not doing what they wish they could do if anxiety was not present.

When individuals become fused with their mind's advice to fight their unpleasant feelings and other internal events, they reinforce their brain pathways of anxiety. Though avoidance appears to be a simple and easy solution, it can lead individuals to feeling depressed and hopeless.

Related Topics

• •Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• •Panic
• •Social Phobia

References

*Anxiety and Depression Association of America. (n.d.). Anxiety Disorders - Facts & Statistics https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics