Therapy for Anxiety

Are you feeling like anxiety is preventing you from living a life that is fulfilling?

Anxiety can be debilitating and feel like it’s literally sapping the life out of us, which can lead to negative thoughts and feelings that overtake and dictate our daily lives. This can make us feel like our lives are out of our control and hopeless.

You may find anxiety showing up in your life in some of these symptoms:

• Difficulty with sleep - going to sleep, staying asleep or being able to get up in the morning
• Unexplained nervousness first thing in the morning or when you wake up
• Persistent thoughts and feelings of dread, danger and/or panic
• Physical symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches
• Physical weakness, persistent tiredness, lethargy
• Trembling, shaking, muscle twitching, butterflies in the belly
• Rapid breathing, hyperventilation
• Increased or heavy sweating
• Isolating from people you care about, avoiding specific events, avoiding social and/or work events, avoiding work, school or uni/tafe/college
• Brain fog, difficulty in being able to focus, constant confusion
• Ruminating, replaying and/or rehearsing events and conversations over and over in your mind to the point of being able to think of little else
• Obsessions about certain thoughts, ideas, people
• Anxiety as a result of traumatic event/s in your life (past or present)
• Some examples of trying to self-medicate or numb with behaviours include (but not limited to) increased drinking of alcohol, increased drug use (prescription and non-prescription), binge eating, food limiting, over-exercising, sex, over-working, shopping, gambling.

To heal the anxiety, we need to address three key elements:

1) Start work on treating the symptoms to provide some relief, so that we can

2) Uncover what is at the root of our anxiety so that we can understand it and learn from it, and

3) Create a future where we are working towards a life where we are in control of our anxiety as opposed to it being in control of us.

Talk therapy is an effective option for treating and working towards healing our anxiety.  Sometimes your GP or psychiatrist may prescribe medications for treating the symptoms of anxiety.  Talk therapy works wonderfully alongside of this by providing us a safe and confidential space, to explore these three key elements and how we can make them work for us.

We can find new ways to:

• regulate our bodies,
• look at situations from different perspectives that are less frightening,
• self-soothe and relax,
• discover healthier coping mechanisms,
• develop problem solving

If you would like to talk about how anxiety is affecting you, please reach out for a free consultation.