Anxiety therapy can improve your quality of life.

Do you wake up at night and struggle to fall back to sleep because you can’t stop worrying? Or do you get out of bed in the morning already feeling a sense of dread and overwhelm? You might have trouble concentrating, or experience a sense of impending doom. Maybe you often feel irritable or fatigued, and while you know you need connection, it’s hard to connect when you feel so on edge. If you find yourself worrying about worst-case scenarios, it can be incredibly hard to relax.

You may feel misunderstood.

Perhaps you’ve been told things in the past like, “don’t worry” or “calm down.” It turns out that it’s not especially relaxing to be told to relax! When others around you seem able to enjoy themselves, you might fear that you’re bringing people down with your worries, so it can be tempting to close off to friends or activities you once enjoyed, or to mask the feelings you’re having. Hiding your struggles can make them feel bigger. If you don’t know what else to do, however, you might just push yourself through the stress, trying to get your body and mind to stop fighting against each other. Maybe your world has gotten smaller as you’ve learned to avoid more and more anxiety triggers. Perhaps you think you should be able to just “deal with it,” and wonder why you haven’t been able to figure out how to do that. You might wonder why some people you know seem so calm, when calmness is a feeling you find only after a drink or two.

Anxiety stresses the body.

Prolonged anxiety may increase blood pressure and strain the cardiovascular system. It can suppress immune function and cause digestive disorders, muscle tension, short-term memory loss, and sleep disorders. It can even contribute to coronary artery disease and heart attack. The physical symptoms of anxiety can feel so distressing that you may find yourself reaching for whatever you can find to numb the feelings or distract yourself from them.

Anxiety is very common.

If you suffer from anxiety, you are in good company. Anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million adults in the United States, and are the most common mental health condition in our country. In our times, we do live with incredible challenges, yet high anxiety can rob people of joy because it focuses a bright light on fear of the future without allowing us to take in the full range of information available to us. However, there is a difference between normal and unhealthy anxiety. How can you tell the difference?

Normal versus unhealthy anxiety

Everyone experiences a low level of anxiety sometimes. Work pressure, parenting, caretaking aging parents- even just looking at social media is enough to create anxiety. However, when anxiety starts to run your life, it’s no longer an adaptive force.

Rarely does chronic anxiety go away on its own. Our brains are hard-wired for survival, and this means that once our nervous systems develop a bias toward anxiety, the “stream” continues to flow in that direction and amplify. Untreated chronic anxiety often increases with time. To regulate the nervous system, re-wire the anxiety-based neural pathways in the brain, and develop a calm, grounded baseline, the support of a trained therapist is often necessary.

Anxiety therapy can change your life.

The good news is that anxiety is highly treatable. During your course of treatment, we will identify your specific goals and explore the factors contributing to your anxiety. We may use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to address problematic thinking patterns fueling your anxiety. We might use EMDR to help you reprocess past experiences at the root of your anxiety. I may teach you techniques to rewire your neural circuitry to help your brain deactivate its danger signals so that your nervous system can default to its “rest and digest” state. You might learn stress reduction techniques. We may talk about lifestyle changes you could make to enhance your anxiety reduction efforts.

I have helped people with anxiety find peace, regain a sense of control, and stop the cycle of anxious thinking since 2012. Beyond my work with clients, I have recovered from my own anxiety. My own experience in combination with my therapeutic training have given me a broad knowledge base about how to help others recover from their struggles, and to find their way to a genuine sense of ease, freedom, and wholehearted enjoyment of life.

You might be anxious about getting anxiety therapy!

Fear of starting therapy is also common. You might worry that it won’t help, that it will be too expensive, or that it will mean you failed to figure this out on your own. Why suffer alone? As humans, we are not great at resolving anxiety by ourselves. Therapy is generally very helpful for most people with anxiety.

Schedule a free consultation now:

zoelewis@therapysecure.com

435-979-3564

Set up a free consult to see if working together to address your anxiety is the right next step for you.