Anxiety
Understanding Anxiety Disorders:
Anxiety disorders refer to a group of mental health conditions characterized by two primary symptoms: persistent and excessive anxiety and fear, accompanied by changes in behavior known as safety behaviors. These symptoms follow a predictable sequence, initiating a vicious four-part cycle.
Background: What is anxiety?
To comprehend the anxiety cycle, it's essential that you grasp the nature of anxiety and fear. The purpose of anxiety and fear is to serve as signals of threat, assisting us in responding to our environment and ensuring our success and survival as a species.
While fear is the biological reaction (i.e., fight-or-flight) we experience towards a perceived immediate threat, anxiety is the emotion of nervousness we feel regarding a future concern. That is, for fear the danger is in the present and for anxiety the danger is in the future.
Both fear and anxiety are designed to facilitate coping. However, if you struggle with an anxiety disorder, these automatic responses become uncontrollable, impeding your ability to cope.
This occurs because you continually overestimate (present and future) danger while underestimating your ability to respond to that danger. It is this overestimation of threat and underestimation of your abilities to cope that initiate and maintain your anxiety cycle.
UNDERSTANDING ANXIETY DISORDERS
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UNDERSTANDING ANXIETY DISORDERS //
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It all starts when a particular trigger – whether it's thoughts, situations, events, places, or objects – sets off feelings of anxiety and fear.
These emotions come crashing in, accompanied by relentless worry and negative thoughts, leaving you feeling overwhelmed. It's like being swept away, struggling to stay in the present moment as your mind gets lost in thoughts of the past or future.
This struggle to stay grounded only adds fuel to the fire, intensifying your anxiety and perpetuating the distressing cycle.
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Once anxiety and fear are triggered, the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response automatically kicks in.
This is why anxiety disorders are accompanied by physical symptoms like rapid breathing, tense muscles, restlessness, rapid heartbeat, and sweating. In response to these discomforting feelings and physical sensations, you resort to maladaptive coping strategies.
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Safety behaviors are the mental and physical acts you perform to prevent feared outcomes and reduce your anxiety and fear. In anxiety disorders, the most common safety behaviors are avoidance and worry. Sadly, neither of these methods is effective in the long run.
Avoidance involves staying away from people, places, objects, or circumstances in an attempt to escape uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or perceived outcomes. Whereas worry is defined as negative and repetitive thinking about bad things that could happen in the future.
According to decades of research, we worry for three reasons: 1) it helps us avoid painful feelings; 2) we believe it’s uncontrollable; and 3) we believe it’s beneficial. We think that worrying not only helps us problem-solve, but it also somehow prevents bad things from happening.
However, worrying is not helpful for coping and it’s not uncontrollable. If you are willing, you can learn how to stop worrying (and avoiding) and addressing this is a major cornerstone of successful therapy.
In addition to avoidance and worry, other safety behaviors include reassurance seeking (e.g., asking someone repeatedly if they are mad at you), physical safety behaviors (e.g., consuming drugs or alcohol to cope), and self-criticism/self-punishment.
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Unfortunately, the relief brought about by safety behaviors is fleeting, and anxiety returns with increased intensity. Relying on safety behaviors not only perpetuates and strengthens your anxiety but also reinforces your belief that avoiding and worrying are the only ways you can navigate challenges.
People struggling with an anxiety disorder discover that they need to increase their use of safety behaviors to achieve the same level of relief. As a result, important aspects of life such as relationships, hobbies, school, and work are neglected.
Treatment for Anxiety Disorders
Even though anxiety can significantly disrupt your life, scientifically supported treatments are available. Positioned as the frontline intervention for anxiety disorders, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) equips you with tools to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts and beliefs. Following this, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) aids in testing and reshaping these beliefs by confronting you with your triggers.
Complementing CBT and ERP, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) stands as an empirically validated approach, guiding you toward more constructive responses to anxiety, allowing a redirection of focus towards meaningful pursuits. In addressing anxiety disorders, my therapeutic approach integrates ACT, CBT, and ERP.
Beyond these, I draw from diverse modalities like Existential Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to delve into and address the emotional and relational dynamics that may be underlying or intensifying your anxiety, including trauma, addiction, shame, depression, low self-esteem, and relationship challenges.
This holistic method considers not just your anxiety symptoms but also takes into account your life experiences, present circumstances, interpersonal patterns, and your identity as a whole. This comprehensive strategy goes beyond symptom reduction, aiming for long-lasting healing.