On Anxiety

I often address anxiety with clients and see significant and long-lasting progress when clients are committed to making change. Here are a few important considerations:

1). Anxiety is treatable.

During our work together, one of the first things we define is the nature of the anxiety. What are the symptoms? What are the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors contributing to the suffering? Does it include excessive worrying, replaying certain situations, or thought loops? Is it health-related anxiety? Does it cause feelings of panic? How does the anxiety affect your body? Understanding what comes up provides a direction on how to approach the treatment.

As a therapist, I approach the treatment of anxiety through the lens of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Generalized anxiety and other forms of anxiety are attributed to recurring triggers from internal or external events. These events can cause a flurry of automatic negative thoughts which in turn, generate emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses. Treatment includes identifying these triggers and building the needed skills.

2). Self-knowledge, symptom tracking, and gaining awareness is half the challenge.

Noticing when anxiety occurs is powerful. Mindfully understanding what it looks and feels like at the moment is imperative. For example, repeatedly replaying an event that resulted in feelings of failure, is a form of anxiety known as rumination. If we learn that rumination occurs when trying to go to sleep, we will collaboratively identify strategies to move through that ruminative state when winding down at night. This could look like calming the body through diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscles relaxation, visualization, or healthy distractions such as reading.

3). Anxiety doesn’t necessarily fully “go away” but transforms into a tool for continued life improvement and maintenance.

Some clients state that they want life to go back to the way it was before they began to suffer anxiety or panic. Working through anxiety is a journey and embarking on this journey involves personal development.

First, a client becomes intimately aware of their thought processes. This knowledge gives someone choices around how they may want to shift certain thought processes. Second, working through anxiety provides an awareness of how anxiety affects the body. This knowledge helps identify ways to calm the body when feeling overwhelmed. And third, working through anxiety helps give light to behaviors. Some people avoid certain anxiety-provoking situations or thoughts and try to push them away. Developing exposure exercises to address certain situations or thoughts can be helpful in addressing any avoidance that perpetuates and feeds the anxiety. It might be unfair to say that anxiety will just go away, but it is fair to say you will learn how to work through it.

In developing this knowledge, and making incremental changes, one opens life in powerful ways. Often anxiety occupies significant real estate in someone’s thoughts. Once worked through, there’s more space to feel fulfilled, to live life, and to be present and actively engaged.