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Therapy for Anxiety
What is Anxiety?
Experiencing nervousness before a test or big event is completely normal, but if anxiety limits the way you live your life, then working with a professional to process and manage your anxiety may be beneficial.
Anxiety is a general term used to describe issues of nervousness, fear, worry or panic. Whilst these are common life experiences, they can become excessive for some people who become stuck in negative thoughts cycles, emotional overwhelm or negative anticipations of what is to come.
Some characteristics associated with anxiety include:
- Feelings of panic
- Heart palpitations
- Muscle tension
- Worrying Expectations
- Sleep deprivation
- Becoming easily fatigued
- Avoidance behaviours
- Negative Expectations
- Shortness of breath
- Difficulties in concentration
- trembling
- Feelings of fear
Experiencing Anxiety Beyond Your Control
Anxiety can often feel like it is beyond your control, and you may have been trying to control it for years but feel like it just won’t stop! It is often the case, that anxiety is not supposed to be controlled as such. Anxiety is there to tell us something. Counselling and Psychotherapy can help to process what the anxiety is trying to tell us.
Other times, however, the anxiety is more over-reactive, out of line with the current situations and extremely limits living the life you want to live.
This can lead to an over sensitivity to triggers, low sense of self-worth or trust in one’s abilities and sense of security in the world.
There are strategies which can be used to challenge and direct thought and emotional processes to manage the anxiety and help bring it to lower levels so that processing and coping with it becomes much easier. Then you can start to overcome the anxiety and begin to live life more freely.
Anxiety can affect many areas of life, including:
Working- performance and stress
Relationship and social situation
Going outside
Going to unknown places
Making decisions-large small
Feeling unable to be yourself/fear of how others respond
Learn to live life freely
There are often past events and unmet needs which help give rise to Anxiety. These can be processed in counselling and worked through in a comfortable pace. Whether your Anxiety is primarily thought-based, or body-based (emotions and/or physical symptoms), the cycle of Anxiety does not have to continue.
You do not have to have been diagnosed with a specific anxiety disorder to be able to get support for anxiety. Many people, who do not meet the criteria for a formal diagnosis, struggle with anxiety difficulties which can impact many areas of their life and well-being.
Panic Disorder
Panic Disorder is characterised by having panic attacks on a regular basis. A panic attack recurs as a reaction to a situation that you might find stressful and can last up between five to ten minutes. Characteristics associated with panic attacks include heart palpitations, shortness of breath, trembling, sweating, chest pains and numbness, amongst others.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
OCD is characterised by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. Thought processes often involve doubts and uncertainty, Thought/Action Fusion: the belief that thoughts equals prescribed behaviours, contamination: beliefs that you will be severely affected by relatively harmless situations, and incompleteness: obsessions around certain things needing to be symmetrical or done in systematic and correct way. Compulsions are often behaviours deemed to protect the individual from the dangers within obsessive thoughts.