Are You Overwhelmed By Worry, Stress, Or Fear?

Do you tend to ruminate about the past or spend too much time worrying about the future? You might often lie awake at night dreading an upcoming meeting, presentation, or event, especially if you feel unprepared for it. You might dwell on worst-case scenarios regarding your career, health, or children.

Is chronic stress making you physically unwell? You might have headaches, neck or back aches, stomach pains, or tension in your body. You may even have been diagnosed with high blood pressure, heart disease, or diabetes, conditions which have all been scientifically linked to anxiety.

Have you adopted unhealthy coping mechanisms? Alcohol use and anxiety disorders often co-occur, for example, with as many as one in five anxiety patients suffering from alcohol dependence. Even if substance use isn’t a problem for you, you might be turning to work, food, social media, or apps to soothe and numb anxiety.

What Causes Anxiety?

Anxiety is actually a normal and often necessary part of life. In its healthiest forms, it can motivate us to prepare for challenges and inspire us to take positive action. It can also protect us from physical or psychological danger. Our ancient ancestors survived, in part, because of their anxiety.

Anxiety is also a common response to our fast-paced world, becoming more a hindrance than a help. Thanks to evolving technology, the boundary between our professional and personal lives has blurred. In order to succeed in today’s relentlessly competitive business environment, many of us feel the need to be constantly plugged in. Our professional responsibilities—and their accompanying stress—often bleed into our evenings, weekends, and even our vacations.

For many people, the challenges of working along with raising healthy children, adjusting to information overload, and dealing with political strife and threats of climate crisis, wildfires or pandemics, etc. are compounded by personal health issues, relationship struggles, and/or financial pressures. These stressors can quickly add up, triggering our biological stress responses even when no immediate physical threat is present. In the words of The Book of Life, “We carry in our bones—into the calm of the suburbs—the terrors of the savannah.”

Difficult childhoods often magnify this propensity for anxiousness. We now know that certain types of adverse childhood experiences can have a lifelong impact. If you were abused or neglected, raised by someone with a mental illness, or subjected to emotional or physical violence or otherwise adverse circumstances, the unresolved trauma from those experiences may still be affecting you today—sometimes even if, oddly, your childhood seemed relatively “normal.”

When anxiety becomes too frequent, intense, or disruptive, it stops helping and starts to hinder. The good news is that with the help of a skilled therapist, you can not only learn to cope with anxiety but decrease its long-term frequency and severity. With time, courage, and professional help, you can eliminate harmful coping mechanisms and restore your physical and mental health.

Regain A Sense Of Calm With Anxiety Counseling

Many people instinctively try to bury deep, painful emotions like fear, anger, and sadness. Often, this behavior is developed early in life, and over the years, becomes deeply entrenched. So when—inevitably—life events evoke strong emotions like fear, anger, or sadness, the psychic infrastructure for processing these feelings may be weak or lacking. When these feelings can’t be included, they can show up as anxiety. 

Your anxiety may be a sign that you have hidden or unacknowledged feelings that are causing or contributing to your distress. That’s why we’ll start with curiosity about your current life and how you’re feeling about it more deeply. I’ll help you develop a stronger psychic infrastructure or emotional “muscles” so that you can bear and include potentially difficult emotions, helping you to become less anxious.

Therapy also gives you the opportunity to explore how you respond to stress and why. More often than not, difficulties coping with stress have something to do with your childhood, especially if you’ve suffered adverse childhood experiences. While certain coping mechanisms may have served you well in the past, I’ll help you develop more productive ways of responding to life’s stressors. 

As you come to understand yourself better, you’ll likely develop a new level of self-compassion. Reflecting on your past challenges may help you recognize that you are not inherently flawed for being anxious. You are simply doing the best you can considering your past and present circumstances. 

Together, we will root out the sources of your anxiety so that you can feel less anxious not just today or tomorrow, but for the rest of your life. Your anxiety might flare up during challenging situations, but overall, you’ll feel you have a roadmap of your triggers and skills to calm yourself. You can expect to experience less tension, greater calm, and fewer physical symptoms with the help of anxiety therapy.

As you consider anxiety counseling, you may be wondering. . . 

Do I really have to explore painful emotions? I thought the whole point of therapy was to feel better.

As a therapist, I will teach you how to deal with anxiety in the moment through deep breathing techniques, cognitive behavioral therapy interventions and mindfulness exercises. If you’re interested in trying medication, I can also refer you to a psychiatrist. In my opinion, though, addressing only the symptoms of your anxiety is just half the battle. 

In addition, I prefer to help you address the underlying root causes of your anxiety, allowing you to heal at a much deeper level while providing you with long-term anxiety relief. Take solace that the initial discomfort of learning to include difficult feelings is short-lived and far outweighs the benefit of having less anxiety—you’ll have a greater ability to tolerate feelings and live more richly and deeply, alive to the full spectrum of human experience.  

My life is good in so many ways. I have so much for which to feel grateful. . . Isn’t therapy meant for people who are “in a bad place”?

There is a common misconception that therapy isn’t justified until your life falls apart. In reality, though, you can still benefit from therapy if you have a great job, live in a beautiful place, etc. Even if you seem to “have everything” on an external level, you may continue to feel anxious until you resolve the internal sources of your anxiety. 

I recommend consulting with a therapist before you are in crisis. If, through a preliminary consultation, you find that therapy doesn’t feel necessary, you can feel secure about having established that through proactive self-care. If you do decide to pursue therapy, it will be easier to find the right therapist without the urgency that often accompanies later-stage anxiety. Addressing your anxiety before it intensifies may also lead to more rapid healing.

I’m not sure I have time for therapy.

Sometimes it can be hard to make time for things that are good for us. This is especially common among busy professionals and/or parents. But in the same way that it is worthwhile to set aside time for that weekly fitness class or daily run, it makes sense to carve out time to work on your mental health. 

A skilled therapist can help you become more efficient and effective in everything else you do by reducing the amount of time you spend on fear, worry, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. And unlike those fitness classes (which have to be kept up indefinitely) therapy will continue to support your wellbeing long into the future.

Don’t Let Anxiety Control Your Life

If you’re ready to move past your anxiety and discover a sense of calm, presence, and vitality, I can help. I’ve been guiding clients toward healthier, happier lives for more than 20 years. Contact me today for a free, 20-minutes phone consultation to see if I might be the right person to help you free yourself from stress and anxiety.

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