Anxiety Therapy
Exhausted from overthinking and always expecting the worst?
Maybe you’re going through it physically - stomach in knots, constant sense of tension, feeling flush? Or maybe you’re feeling plagued by a barrage of worry-filled thoughts:
“Did I make the right choice?”
“What if people think I’m weird?”
“I just need someone to tell me it will be ok.”
Anxiety can feel like a broken record - as soon as you think you’re through it, another thought gets repeated that sends you through a loop and makes you question everything again. The thoughts feel sticky and hard to shake, constantly pulling you back in. Sometimes these thoughts make you doubt yourself and your ability to face challenges in your life. Other times these thoughts make you feel like the smallest of mistakes will be catastrophic.
And then there’s the underlying sense of dread. You feel tight and constantly on edge. You’re exhausted. Even though you’ve told yourself - and your loved ones have told you - a million times that the worst case scenario almost never happens, you can’t help but keep playing those scenes out in your head.
But here’s the good news - as overwhelming as anxiety feels right now, it doesn’t have to be like this forever. With support, you can disrupt the cycle of anxiety and find more peace in moving forward with living life on your terms.
Why does anxiety feel so overwhelming?
Our brains are wired to seek safety and certainty. Anxiety is a natural response to the unknown, doing its best to protect us from potential threats. However when anxiety starts running the show, it can make everyday life feel exhausting and overwhelming. It becomes like this overprotective older sibling - well-intentioned, but ultimately leaving us second-guessing ourselves and feeling stuck.
In response to anxiety, we often develop coping strategies to regain a sense of control. These might include over-analyzing our decisions, avoiding things, or pushing ourselves to impossible standards. While these strategies often provide relief in the short term, they can also reinforce the very fears that we are trying to escape, keeping us trapped in this cycle of worry and self-doubt.
But the good news is, you can break free from that cycle. Just as your mind learned to temporarily protect you when you were feeling scared, it can also learn longer term approaches for embracing peace, resilience, and confidence. With the right support, you can develop new ways of managing fear and embracing uncertainty - so you can show up in life the way you truly want to.
Anxiety therapy can help you:
Find moments of respite and relaxation to balance the demands of daily life
Accept anxious feelings as a natural part of life, not something to avoid or battle
Build self-compassion to replace self-criticism and judgment with kindness and understanding
Identify the triggers most likely to spark your anxiety, and develop strategies to manage them
Understand how anxiety serves you and use that awareness to harness anxiety to best meet your needs
Reconnect to your values and create realistic plans to live in alignment with them rather than avoiding them out of worry and fear
Some approaches we can use to help you address anxiety:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an approach that helps you change your relationship with anxiety by learning how to respond to your thoughts and emotions in a way that gives them less control over your life. Instead of getting stuck in a struggle against anxious thoughts, we can work on helping you develop skills to notice them without letting them dictate your actions.
This approach also helps you clarify what your most important values are so that you can focus on taking action in alignment with them, even when anxiety shows up. For example, if you have the thought “What if I say the wrong thing?” or “I’m not sure if I can do this”, we can work on tools to help you acknowledge those thoughts without letting them take you off track from living the life you want. One of the biggest goals of this approach is to help you regain a sense of power over your choices while reducing anxiety’s hold on your life.
Exposure, gradually facing the things that feel difficult, is often an important part of reducing anxiety. Often when dealing with anxiety we find that we have naturally developed avoidance strategies to help us temporarily find some relief. However, over time, these avoidance patterns can actually reinforce our anxious response, making those situations feel even more overwhelming. Our brain starts to associate those triggers with danger – even when they aren’t truly a threat, or at least not as big of a threat as our brain makes them out to be.
That’s why a supportive, gradual approach to facing fears can be so powerful. Together we’ll create a plan to gently approach the situations or thoughts that feel difficult to help your brain relearn that it can tolerate discomfort. This process isn’t about overloading you with stress – it’s about helping you to build confidence, strengthening resilience, and creating freedom to live the life you want.
Relaxation skills can often be a helpful part of anxiety therapy. This can include mindfulness tools, muscle relaxation skills, breathing techniques, guided imagery and others. The goal of relaxation skills is to help you bring down your overall stress level so you can approach your anxiety from a more grounded place. Practicing regular self-care can help increase your overall resiliency, so that when you are facing triggering situations, you’ll have more access to calm, clarity, and confidence.
The goal of relaxation skills isn’t to get rid of anxiety altogether, but to help shift your relationship with anxiety. Like any skill, relaxation techniques become more effective and accessible the more you practice them. Combined with other approaches (such as ACT and exposure approaches), relaxation can be a powerful tool in helping you loosen anxiety’s grip and regaining a sense of control in your life.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to therapy. We’ll work together to find the tools and strategies that fit you best, so you can move toward your goals in a way that feels both effective and sustainable.
Thinking about starting therapy to work on anxiety, but still have some questions?
I’m worried that facing the things I’m anxious about will make me feel worse.
That worry makes total sense. Facing our fears can feel overwhelming, especially when they’ve had such an impact on our lives. Doing so in a gradual and supported way can be a powerful tool in reducing anxiety’s hold on your life. My approach is to balance safety and risk taking - supporting you in taking the risks that make the most sense for your goals without overloading your ability to tolerate the stress you are facing.
How long will it take to feel better?
The timeline for therapy is different for everyone. The approach I take for anxiety therapy is individualized to you and your needs. Some people find relief in a few sessions while others need more time to work through their goals. Throughout our work together, we’ll regularly check in on your progress, adjust our approach as needed, and ensure that you’re feeling supported every step of the way.
How do I avoid becoming dependent on therapy to manage my anxiety?
From the time we start working together, my goal is to help you feel confident in your ability to manage anxiety on your own. Generally we find that the more practice you are able to put in outside of session, the more readily these skills are available to use on your own when you need them. Therapy is about helping you make sustainable changes that last, so that you feel empowered long after our work together ends.
Anxiety doesn’t have to control your life.
While anxiety can feel overwhelming at times, you don’t have to navigate it on your own. You can learn to shift your relationship with anxious thoughts, gain confidence in facing your fears, and live a life more fully aligned with your values.
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