Anxiety Help

A certain amount of anxiety is a normal and common human experience and is often a helpful inner warning signal that some aspect of ourselves needs our attention. Something might be off in our life, like an immediate danger, making a commitment to a second-best career path, an inappropriate partner, or a bad investment strategy. An important life skill is the ability to differentiate anxiety as a helpful signal (and something that can be responded to) from anxiety that is symptomatic of a treatable disorder. Sometimes that alarm bell gets stuck until we reset it, or if ignored, will continue to ring until we investigate and make the appropriate changes. Psychotherapy helps us sort that out and develop a path to resolution.

Anxiety symptoms can escalate, become chronic, very uncomfortable, and even disabling. When they begin to interfere with normal daily living, people benefit from seeking therapy, the sooner the better. Anxiety disorders are the most common cause of disability in the workplace, and 29% of the population will have this problem at some point in their lives.

Anxiety is the body’s physiological, mental, and emotional reaction to people and situations that scare us, worry us, upset us, stress us. Sometimes there appears to be no cause behind our symptoms. People tend to be born with a genetic sensitivity to experience anxiety under situations others would find not alarming.

Often the source of anxiety is unconscious so that the symptoms seem to come out of nowhere. For example, you or I might be driving along and have an anxiety attack, which we experience as a heart attack, taking us to the ER. We think it’s a physical disorder, and while there is relief when we find out that our heart is fine and our issue is psychological in origin, that information can also be perplexing and upsetting. It might be hard to believe what we are being told. The problem feels physical, and many of us are not accustomed to thinking of a psychological basis for physical symptoms.

• Fearful Feelings
• Depressed mood
• Tension
• Obsessiveness, compulsions (OCD)
• Insomnia
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Anger
• Irritability
• Nervousness
• Confusion
• Agitation
• Chest pain
• Over-all body pains
• Restlessness
• Phobias
• Stomach aches and nausea
• Compulsions
• Muscle Pain
• Guilt
• Rumination and worry
• Shortness of breath
• Excessive sweating
• Elevated blood pressure and heart rate

Names for various anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety disorder; panic disorder; various phobias; agoraphobia; social anxiety disorder; obsessive-compulsive disorder; and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The tendency to have ‘nervous’ symptoms seems to run in families, suggesting a genetic predisposition. All kinds of life stressors create them, from people and situations we can’t control like losing a job to things that alarm us because of our belief systems, like the belief that snakes are dangerous and then reacting with anxiety to a garden snake. Some of these responses seem to be hard-wired in the human brain, like the fear of falling that babies exhibit right after birth.

Common causes of anxiety and it’s related symptoms stem from problems in a relationship, career, health, parenting, finances, and issues with addiction, self-esteem, worthiness, psychological coping style, and belief systems.

Even when people can not connect their symptoms to the underlying cause, a careful investigation can often reveal the hidden problem and lead to resolution. When fear responses seem to exist without apparent cause and with no underlying psychological/environmental distress, there is an assumption of biological mechanisms; and medication with anxiety management education is the treatment of choice. For example, social anxiety seems to run in families. There may be no particular cause. It shows up early in a child’s life. It can cause great misunderstanding and hurt and can be helped with medication and psychotherapy focusing on self-acceptance and learning helpful living skills.

How I can help: Psychotherapy based on immediate symptom reduction and longer term awareness to identify and transform underlying causes, is what I provide. Medication can be a very important short term adjunct to psychotherapy; and a referral to an appropriate psychiatrist or the family doctor may be initiated.

Generally speaking, psychotherapy has proven quite effective for long term remission of anxiety disorders. Learning the skills of mindfulness and meditation, symptom management, and stress reduction along with changing the underlying personality dynamics are important aspects of this psychotherapy.

Sometimes symptoms of anxiety occur along with symptoms of depression and they feed each other. Psychotherapy benefits all of these inter-related symptoms disorders.