Therapy for Managing Anxiety
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Therapy for Anxiety
What is Anxiety
“I’m anxious” is how a lot of my clients summarise their problem. When we think of the term Anxiety, there’s two ways we think of it – we might think of the natural evolutionary physiological response we have to situations of threat, danger, or outside our comfort zone; or we might think of the excessive response, irrational thinking and fear driven avoidance that clients typically come to therapy to overcome.
Types of Anxiety
Anxiety can take many different forms from excessive worry, to perfectionism, to work stress, to OCD, to panic attacks, to phobias and more. All of these types of anxiety can be incredibly frustrating and draining. Each of these types of anxiety will affect our day to day functioning in different ways. It may be that you are researching, planning or checking excessively. It could be that you are avoiding situations outside of your control, or new situations. You may have begun to avoid situations that you’ve previously experienced panic or fear in.
The impact on your quality of life when anxiety is out of control is significant, and often quite depressing. It takes us away from living the life we want and that will make us happy, instead our lives are ruled by our irrational thoughts and fears.
Symptomsof Anxiety
The physical symptoms of excessive anxiety can be very powerful and debilitating. They can include difficulty sleeping, poor concentration, muscle tension and headaches, stomach churning, feelings sick and dizzy, tight chest and many others. When excessive anxiety is not addressed, these symptoms can escalate leading to digestive issues, skin rashes or spots, hair loss, weight loss, increased blood pressure, migraines, insomnia and more. These symptoms can be understandably distressing and scary. At Hannah Paskin Therapy I will help you to understand what is going on and learn effective strategies for intercepting the vicious cycle of anxiety.
Excessive anxiety isn’t only physical. It also involves lots of irrational thoughts or worries. This is then amplified when we start changing what we do because we believe these thoughts. E.g., I worry I’m not doing a good enough job, so I work twice as hard; I worry I’m going to have a panic attack so I avoid driving on the motorway; I worry something bad is going to happen to someone I love, so I do a ritual to prevent it; I worry I won’t be able to cope, so I avoid trying new things.
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Therapy for Anxiety
Treatment for Anxiety will help you to understand what the problem is and why. As well as working on the symptoms in the here and now, it is important to understand the history and patterns of anxiety, to ensure you can prevent it taking over again in future.
Our way of thinking and behaving in situations that make us anxious have often been in place for a long time. Therapy will therefore look at developing new ways of thinking and behaving that will enable you to overcome anxiety.
CBT for Anxiety
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy focuses on our thoughts and our behaviours. Through Hannah Paskin Therapy, you will learn to recognise and challenge your irrational thoughts, you will also learn to face and overcome situations you’ve previously avoided or dealt with in an anxious way. There are strategies taught in sessions that you can practice between appointments.
Benefits of Therapy for Anxiety
Most people’s goal when overcoming anxiety is to increase their confidence, and be able to be the real them doing all the things they want that anxiety currently prevents. That is certainly my aim too. Treatment with me isn’t about learning to cope with or tolerate the anxiety, it’s about overcoming it and being able to live your best life.
My unique approach
Providing knowledge to my clients is particularly important. But it’s also important that their questions are answered. If there’s things you want to know, if you want my opinion or input, I’m happy to share it. I offer a straight-talking approach that’s focused on getting you the best result and as quickly as possible – no-one should suffer any longer than absolutely necessary. I also incorporate lots of analogies and simple visual diagrams in my therapy sessions which guarantee you will remember concepts and strategies long after therapy sessions have stopped.
