Anxiety & How We Help
Managing Anxiety, and How Therapy Can Help
You’re likely reading this because you feel your life is overly controlled by fear, worry, obsessions, panic, or overthinking. You may be wondering if your own experience can even be described as anxiety. While anxiety can sometimes take over and make you feel miserable, there is ample reason for hope. With effort, you can expect improvement, and therapy helps guide that effort in a skillful and compassionate way.
Looking for help is a courageous first step: anxiety disorders are highly treatable, yet only 36.9% of those suffering receive treatment. It’s okay to need help with this. Needing help doesn’t make you weak, it makes you human.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety can manifest itself in many different ways. Constant worry. Crippling fear. Overwhelming panic. Frequent anxious thoughts about the future or the past. Feeling stuck in your head constantly (rumination) or experiencing obsessive, intrusive thoughts.
We all experience moments of worry and nervousness, especially when it comes to things that are highly important to us, or when stress is higher. In fact, this is a useful function of your brain, as it tries to protect your well-being by predicting challenges to be handled or avoided. But what if your anxiety levels are frequently elevated and getting in the way of your ability to live your life? If that’s what you’re feeling, then counseling and therapy have proven to be very helpful.
It helps to understand that early on, our brains evolved to include a threat protection system. A small part of the brain called the amygdala can sound the alarm, triggering ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ sensations that protect us. But later, our brains also evolved the ability to review the past and project into the future. We end up with a combination of these brain functions that sometimes works to our advantage, but other times not so much.
The brains of people with anxiety problems are working so hard to protect them from perceived threats that they actually hurt them.
Fear and worry that flare up when needed and in just the right amount? Great! Anxiety and stress that are constantly sounding alarms or frequently triggering a cascade of physical reactions? Very difficult to deal with.
What do Anxiety Disorders Look Like?
Anxiety issues can show up in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, a sign to look for is that fear, worry, or anxious feelings have become so persistent that they make daily functioning difficult.
Here are some of the more common ways people are affected by anxiety.
- Chronic daily worry that is so loud it drowns out the valued parts of your life might be Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
- Intense, acute episodes where your brain kicks on the fight/flight system when it isn’t needed might be panic symptoms or panic attacks, which can lead to Panic Disorder or Agoraphobia.
- Some people develop specifically-focused intense fears that are called Phobias.
- When social interaction is the primary cause of elevated levels of worry, that might be Social Anxiety Disorder.
- And when unwanted obsessions and intrusive thoughts lead to patterns of compulsive behaviors that interfere in a person’s ability to function, that may be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Some people experience anxiety in a primarily physical way: pounding heart, pit of dread in the stomach, breathlessness, or dizziness and nausea. Others feel their anxiety more in their thoughts: persistent worries, ‘what if’ predictions and the alarms that accompany undesired outcomes, obsessions, and ruminating or feeling stuck in their thoughts constantly. And many are likely to experience their anxiety in some combination of both physical AND mental ways.
What Causes High Levels of Anxiety?
The best research to this point suggests that anxiety problems can be caused by several things, often in combination, including biology, genetics, environmental stress, trauma, medical conditions, and even personality type. Because several medical issues can also lead to elevated anxiety, it’s helpful to meet with a doctor to examine these possible causes.
What Can I Do About my Anxiety?
Therapy helps. Full Color Psychology has anxiety specialists with extensive experience providing treatment for all of its manifestations. In addition to that resource, here are a few things you can start with right now.
First, know that you’re not alone. Not by a long stretch. In fact, you’re one of the 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older who experience anxiety at a level that impairs their life in a significant way.
Second, build compassion for yourself. Your anxiousness is not your fault. Nobody wakes up one day and says, “I’d like to swim in a non-stop sea of worry and fear for a while, that sounds like fun.” Also, don’t believe that sneaky thought that says you’re just making it all up. You know best if anxiety is limiting you, overwhelming you, or keeping you from the things you value in your life.
Third, realize that your brain is not trying to hurt you. It wants to help you. Your brain might be SO good at trying to help you that it ends up hurting you. Anxiety is a tricky thing that is easily exacerbated by our reactions to it. Even in the middle of an intense panic attack, it can help to remember that while what you’re feeling is very uncomfortable, it isn’t dangerous.
It’s simple but effective to stop seeing your anxiety as your enemy, since fear of your anxiety is just going to cause even more of it.
Fourth, it’s okay to stop listening to well-intended but unhelpful advice. “Don’t worry so much.” “That’s not very realistic.” “You need to be more rational.” People will try to help you beat your anxiety with things that work for a more normal amount of fear and worry.
But your anxiety levels are much higher and more complicated. Fighting and struggling to “just calm down” in the face of physical anxiety often exacerbates it. Trying to rationally defeat all your worries and fears makes them worse and can get you even more stuck in your head. The committee in your brain tasked with keeping you safe from all possible threats doesn’t care about your logic, or about what’s likely. It only cares about what’s possible.
Successfully navigating a higher level of anxiety takes a different set of skills.
What to Expect from Anxiety Therapy
A skilled anxiety therapist will build a trusting connection with you and help you fully explore how anxiety and worry show up in your day-to-day life, maybe even shedding light on places it has been taking over for so long you don’t recognize it anymore.
Dr. Dallas Jensen employs a combination of Exposure Therapy and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), both of which have research evidence backing their effectiveness in treating anxiety. ACT is essentially part of the family of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) approaches but differs in some important ways, and can be particularly good for very “thinky” people who have already exhausted themselves trying to reason with the distorted thoughts that anxiety can produce. And in the case of OCD, the gold standard approach that is utilized is Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP).
Exposure therapy involves intentionally facing, in moderate doses, the things that set off the anxiety and alarms in your brain and body, breaking the typical anxiety cycle and over time teaching the brain to respond differently. It also prompts you to think about your experience of anxiety differently and to get through it without making matters worse.
As you search for a therapist, make sure that any professional you might work with is planning to incorporate some element of exposure therapy into your treatment. This ingredient is incredibly important for a successful outcome. Unfortunately, sometimes therapists will try to treat your anxiety with other approaches that neglect this ingredient and don’t have nearly the same scientific support.
If you have more questions about anxiety treatment or would like to consult with a professional from Full Color Psychology, contact us today.