Counseling Specialty Areas: Anxiety

Anxiety is far more common than you may think. Anxiety is the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting more than one in six adults. There is no formula for a “type” of person that develops anxiety, nor is there a specified time when anxiety manifests. Anxiety can be rooted in any combination of your genes, brain chemistry and life events. Anxiety can feel overwhelming at times and counseling can help provide insight as to the root-causes of anxiety and create a platform to help manage through these symptoms in the short and long term.

Day to day, we all experience anxiety in some form or another. The pressures of work, family, relationships and school can all cause moments or prolonged periods of anxiety and each individual develops their own mechanisms to cope with these day-in/day-out challenges. Even for people in these situations, going to therapy to discuss their anxiety can help sharpen these tools, create better frameworks for daily living, and allow people to have more energy and space to live their lives.

In some cases, however, anxiety can take over large portions of your life, leaving you feeling like you cannot live your life the way you want. In these instances, you become fearful of the unknown, persistently focused on negative outcomes, indecisive, edgy, afraid to relax, or overcome with a constant sense of worry. These feelings can make it hard to manage relationships, perform at work or school, and can impact sleep, which sets up a vicious cycle of exhaustion that can fuel anxiety.

​

In these instances, therapy can help immediately by stabilizing your situation while delving into triggers and developing tools to help with sensory recognition and methods to better manage through day-to-day situations. Therapy can also help determine if your anxiety may be related to another undiagnosed or untreated condition like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

 

At A Path Forward, we are dedicated to offering the right level of support for you whether you are new to therapy or are coming back to therapy to help manage through a particular situation.

 

We take a two-pronged approach to treating anxiety:

​​

• The cognitive aspect focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts or worries and working to develop tools to recognize these thoughts in the moment and deal with them in a more constructive manner

• The self-care aspect consists of a daily regimen of activities that you commit to keep your anxiety manageable. The most important aspect of self-care is that it is a daily habit, not a “once a week” thing. Self-care is a commitment to good sleep, healthy eating, time with friends and family, pursuing hobbies, recognizing positive aspects of life regardless of circumstances, exercise, time alone, and most importantly: Self-Compassion, which is the habit of treating yourself the way you would a good friend – remembering that a mistake is sometimes just a mistake, and that you need to cut yourself some slack

 

At A Path Forward, we are passionate about removing the mystery around anxiety and how it can be treated. Anxiety is a universal experience for so many people and there are so many tools that can be quickly developed and implemented. These slight changes can result in immediate improvements in daily life, which allows people to evolve into more confident, self-assured, liberated individuals, and lets them live their life more completely.

 

We would love to have you come in for a session so we can talk about how to build long-term support structures and develop and implement self-care habits that set you up for long-term success.