Anxiety Treatment

Does anxiety make you feel like you’re stuck in place?

• How is the quality of your sleep?

• Can you fall asleep easily, or does your mind race with uncontrolled thoughts and excessive worries?

• Are you often overwhelmed by fear or apprehension?

If troubling thoughts keep you from feeling confident, you may have found yourself avoiding social events and activities you used to enjoy. However, this has only led to greater feelings of isolation, and now you’re worried that you’re missing opportunities.

Perhaps you sense that something’s not quite right, but you can’t exactly define what it is. Your fear may be giving rise to bouts of anger that affect your relationships or work performance. And as a result, you may struggle to concentrate on your tasks, concerned about losing your job.

Anxiety takes different forms.

Your anxiety might manifest physically, emotionally, mentally — or all three. 

It could be situational or an ongoing form of stress known as a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which causes you to feel anxious and worried for prolonged periods of time. Social anxiety arises in crowds of people, social situations, and public speaking. It may cause you to fear criticism or embarrassment in front of others, which creates the impulse to socially disengage. Alternately, you might be struggling with a panic disorder, a form of anxiety characterized by an overwhelming and intense sense of anxiety and panic.

On top of that, symptoms like insomnia only exacerbate anxiety, leaving you exhausted as you struggle to stay on top of daily tasks. Maybe you’re encountering headaches, chest pains, heart palpitations, or a range of irrational fears that derail you from being present in the moment.

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be wondering why you feel like this and what concrete steps could help bring relief. Fortunately, with the support of a therapist, you can deal with your unique anxiety issues and get the relief you need.

Anxiety is common.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders constitute the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 40 million adults 18 and older. That’s 18% of the population! Despite its treatable nature, only 37% of anxiety sufferers receive treatment.(1)

Anxiety is a normal response to our hectic lives in turbulent times. Work stress, responsibilities, self-care, family, relationships, social media, daily bad news — there’s so much happening in our lives that we can scarcely stop to breathe. Even if we don’t suffer from a full-blown anxiety disorder, it’s natural to feel anxious.

It’s not easy to handle anxiety on our own.

Let’s be honest; men are often not comfortable with seeking therapy. Needing help with emotional or mental issues is seen as a weakness. We would much rather handle things on our own. But the coping mechanisms we often fall back on, like alcohol or marijuana, only serve to help us cope in the short term, and they may delay the relief we need.

Of course, more positive interventions like deep breathing, meditation, and exercise can certainly go a long way toward helping you manage day-to-day flare-ups of anxiety. However, professional anxiety counseling gets at the core of your distress. 

Together, you and your therapist can talk through the issues that extend deeper than temporary anxiety management. You’re looking for transformation and long-term relief, not a surface-level quick fix.

Anxiety treatment helps you heal.

We provide a relaxed, welcoming environment to help you reduce anxiety and allow you to do your best work. In therapy, we take a personal approach by listening to what is troubling you, helping you recognize the deeper sources of your anxiety, and thereby ease it.

As men in particular, we tend to live a lot in our heads. This default tends to fuel our anxiety even further. Getting out of our heads helps us find new ways to transform anxiety by working with emotions. While overthinking, we produce worries and assumptions that tend to keep us from dealing with the deeper emotions and fears that need to be addressed for long-term healing.

Self-criticism or pushing yourself to do more, work harder, or be better can also lead to more anxiety. In looking at the relationship you have with yourself, you’ll begin to better understand your anxiety and consider how self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy play into your anxiety.

What you can expect in anxiety treatment sessions.

Just the process of talking and hearing your own words can be therapeutic. Sometimes hearing yourself out loud will dispel those irrational thoughts that float around in the confines of your own head. Talking through what’s real and what’s irrational can show you the fictional stories and assumptions you conjure up based on negative experiences from the past. Rather than allowing your thoughts to dwell on misguided projections of the future, we can work together to help you focus on the present.

We understand how the root of what’s driving your anxiety can be dealt with to provide future relief. Our therapists also realize that improving lifestyle choices can be another powerful way to manage your anxiety. 

For example, body awareness and exercises can help you to identify and resolve your anxiety on a physical level. Oftentimes, your nagging pain is out of view and requires you to put yourself in better touch with your body as a direct way to access it. At times, you might brush off or neglect parts of your body as mere symptoms of your anxiety, when they actually serve as the doorway. 

In therapy sessions, we’ll look at where and how you store your anxiety and work through ways to release it. You will not need to continue carrying this burden.

We use a diversified approach for anxiety treatment.

Our therapists have helped people suffering from anxiety for over 25 years, using a multifold approach toward addressing your anxiety. We use various treatment methods, like:

• Gestalt Body Awareness Exercises – a body-focused approach that can include movement, body scanning, or guided imagery. Through it, you can become more aware of the physical sensations you’re feeling and how these connect to the emotions you’re experiencing.

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – a modality that helps you identify automatic negative thoughts and unhelpful behavior patterns and replace them with more positive ones to reduce future distress.

• Trauma Resilience Modeling (TRM) – a somatic-based therapy that focuses on the automatic responses of the human body when dealing with trauma.

Therapy provides the benefit of managing anxiety in a safe setting. A compassionate therapist can help you glean awareness and specific skills. Together, we’ll work to lower your anxiety and help you achieve the relief that you’re seeking.

You may still have some concerns about anxiety therapy…

(1) https://adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics

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