Anxiety

THOUGHTS ON ANXIETY

Do you feel too much anxiety, tension, stress, or fear?

• Are you feeling stress about money, changes in health, or a stressful relationship?
• Do have anxiety in social situations?
• Do you have fears and phobias you’d like to overcome?
• Are you experiencing performance fears in sports, sex, dramatic arts, at work, etc.?
• Do you have panic attacks?

Understanding how anxiety works can help us treat it effectively. Anxiety consists of three components: thoughts, feelings, and bodily responses. These components form a cycling chain of events that can combine to create either a chronic tension and anxiety, or an escalating anxiety leading to panic.

For example, the thought "Oh no, I’m afraid I’m gonna blow it" makes us feel more anxious, which can cause us to breathe more shallowly and rapidly, which in turn can make us feel more light-headed and dry-mouthed, creating an even more anxious feeling, triggering the thought "I’m losing control," making us tighten and constrict even more, restricting blood flow, and so on into a very uncomfortable state.

Anxiety is one of the most treatable conditions of all. Anxiety is treatable because, once we understand your particular thoughts, feelings, and physical reactions that form your experience, we can intervene and break the chain. We can help you understand as much as possible about the structure and the origins of your anxiety, and then work with you to design a treatment plan, involving:

• where to most effectively intervene, in order to break the cycle
• how to construct new behaviors, strategies, and routines that help you process stress and tension, and minimize anxiety
• exploring some of the underlying emotional origins of your fear or anxiety, (if that feels interesting and relevant to you)
• providing the guidance and support that is needed to get through these anxious, stressful periods.

At Blue Mountain Counseling, I can help you change your relationship to stress and anxiety, so they don’t have as much power over you.