About Anxiety
Anxiety goes beyond regular stress. While stress motivates a person to pay attention and to perform well, anxiety is an excess of stress and pressure that leads to poorer focus and poorer performance. The excess stress may be due to the anxious person placing too much importance on the situation or seeing the situation as being too much for them to handle.
Causes
People often want to know what causes anxiety. For many anxious people, anxiety tends to run in their family. This tendency comes from genetics as well as from watching the examples of parents and siblings. Major life transitions or other stressful events can lead to anxiety as well.
Treatment
During your first counseling session to treat your anxiety, your therapist will listen carefully to your concerns, gather background information, and create a treatment plan customized to your individual situation. In the sessions that follow, you will then learn useful skills to help you manage your physical, behavioral, mental, and emotional symptoms. The focus will be on giving you the direction you need to achieve your goals for counseling.
Some symptoms of anxiety include
- Excessive worry that is often difficult to control – “What if [bad outcome] happens?”
- Difficulty concentrating or remembering things
- Irritability
- Restlessness
- Fatigue
- Muscle tension in the neck, shoulders, or back
- Difficulty falling or staying asleep
- Avoiding the feared situation or task
- Anxiety that interferes with participation in work meetings or projects
- Anxiety that interferes with trusting people or with engaging in social conversation
Do you treat Social Anxiety?
Yes, we do treat social anxiety. People with social anxiety are often afraid of embarrassing themselves or afraid of being judged. This anxiety can sometimes be intense and may arise in situations such as going to a social event, meeting new people, asking someone on a date, or making a presentation.
What about Panic Attacks?
We also help people manage panic attacks. Panic attacks usually involve several physical symptoms of anxiety, and they last about 10 minutes. They are usually not life-threatening or harmful to your body, though they are often unpleasant. Some of the physical symptoms may include rapid heart rate, sweating, trembling, change in breathing, a sense of impending doom or danger, chest tension, nausea, headache, dizziness, numbness or tingling, hot flushes, chills, or feeling detached from one’s self or surroundings. Panic attacks happen most often in response to a stressful situation or significant worry. Less commonly, panic attacks can seem to come from out of the blue for some people. In such cases, it is even more important to see your physician to rule out medical conditions. Your therapist can then teach you mental and behavioral coping skills to manage these panic events.