Anxiety is a common reaction to fear, but you don't have to live with it.
Anxious, racing thoughts keeping you up at night?
Occasional anxiety is a part of life. You may feel anxious when faced with a problem at work, before a big test, or before making an important decision. But anxiety disorders involve more than the occasional fear or worry. For a person with anxiety disorder, the occasional worry does not go away and usually gets worse over time. Now that we’re coming out of the pandemic, individuals that normally didn’t have excessive worry, have been triggered from the incredibly difficult year and a half that all of us faced. The good news is, an anxiety therapist can help!
What is Anxiety Treatment?
You may be feeling:
- Irritability, fatigue, or distraction.
- Racing thoughts.
- Having problems sleeping (hard to fall asleep, nightmares, hard to stay asleep).
- Thinking, “I’m not enough.”
- Thinking, “I feel so much better when I’m taking…” (fill in the drug of choice here)
- Trying to put on a good face for the outside world but your insides are screaming.
Anxiety disorders come in many forms: generalized anxiety disorder, frequent panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and specific phobias. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness among Americans—it’s estimated that about 40 million adults struggle with an anxiety disorder in the U.S. alone.
What’s the Connection Between Alcohol and Anxiety?
Probably not surprising to learn that your whole body is affected by anxiety. Your nervous, immune, respiratory, digestive, and cardiovascular systems are taxed when experiencing anxiety. What we may not realize is how interconnected our anxiety and our drinking are, and the impact it has on our bodies and well-being.
While drinking may cause a short term release, the come down from the chemical alterations in your brain increases the level of anxiety we feel. It becomes a vicious cycle of: drinking, panic, and self-medication.
If you find the primary reason for needing help is that you’re self-medicating through drinking or using drugs, I provide support to quit drinking, to understand the root cause of your addiction and to find pleasure in other ways besides drinking.
How I Help Clients with Anxiety
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At the first session of Anxiety Management counseling, we are building your anxiety toolkit so that you can identify triggers and have a few strategies to practice before you leave the office.
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I will listen to your stories, and you and I will consider which stories are helping you and which stories we need to let go of.
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You will begin to heal yourself from the inside out and have the confidence to face difficult situations in the future without having to numb or trying to control everything and everyone around you.
How I Treat Anxiety
I use a variety of methods to treat anxiety because we all come from different backgrounds, life experiences, and genetic makeup. Thus, it wouldn’t make sense to utilize a “one size fits all” treatment approach. But the treatment I’ve found that provides the quickest relief is, brainspotting. Anxiety has a physiological response to threats on our well-being or survival, either actual or potential. And Brainspotting is, according to creator Dr. David Grand, “a physiological therapy with psychological consequences.” So it makes sense that talk therapy alone won’t do the job. Brainspotting therapy is a Dual Attunement process. It is the attunement between the client and the therapist as well as the attunement of the client to their neurophysiology. Within the relationship the technique is used. As you already know, the problem that brought you to where you are today started in the brain and neural system, but the solution is there as well. All the BSP therapist needs to do is help the client’s brain/body heal itself from the inside out. BSP is going beyond the mind to get direct access to the brain. Just as the eyes naturally scan our outside environment for information, they can also be used to scan our internal environment! Brainspotting uses the visual field to turn the scanner back on itself and guide the brain to find “lost” information and ultimately resolution.
Want to Find Freedom from Your Anxiety?
You’ve googled Anxiety Treatment so many times you can recite the list! You made it here because you’re ready to start feeling better. I know asking for help can be vulnerable and at times confusing (e.g. where do you start?) so I’ve outlined a few steps to make it easier.
2. Meet me and learn more about what I do in my Richmond, Virginia Practice.
3. Start Anxiety Treatment and begin to feel authenticity and joy again.
Through Anxiety treatment at my Richmond, VA practice, you will learn the WHY behind why you do not feel good enough. You’ll reduce fear and build up, and learn ways to cope with the anxiety while identifying the source of the issues. Through anxiety counseling, you can finally create the YOU that you want to be.
Ten Cognitive Reminder for Coping with Panic
Ten Cognitive Reminders for Coping with Panic
1. Remember that although your feelings and symptoms are very frightening, they are NOT dangerous or harmful.
2. Understand that what you are experiencing is an exaggeration of your normal bodily reactions to stress.
3. Do not fight your feelings or try to wish them away. The more you are willing to face them, the less intense they become.
4. Do not add to your panic by thinking about what “might” happen. If you find yourself saying, “what if”, tell yourself, “so what.”
5. STAY IN THE PRESENT. Notice what is really happening to you, as opposed to what you think might happen.
6. Label your fear level from 0 to 10, and watch it go up or down. Notice that it does not stay at a very high level for very long.
7. When you find yourself thinking about fear, CHANGE YOUR PRIMARY THOUGHT. Focus on, and carry out, a simple and manageable task.
8. Notice that when you stop adding frightening thoughts to your fear, it begins to fade.
9. When the fear comes, expect it and accept it. Wait and give it time to pass without running away from it.
10. Be proud of yourself and the progress thus far, and think about how good you will feel when you succeed.
If you’re interested in Anxiety treatment, contact me today: