Anxiety Therapy
Do You Feel Like Anxiety Is Controlling Your Life?
Are you struggling with panic attacks, racing thoughts, or feelings of impending doom?
Is chronic stress starting to impact your ability to perform at work and complete basic tasks?
Do you find yourself avoiding opportunities for growth because of how anxious you are?
When you’re living with anxiety, it’s normal to feel like you can’t catch a break. You might feel like your mind is racing a mile a minute and you can’t stop ruminating about what could go wrong tomorrow. It’s like you’re always living in the future instead of the present, anticipating the worst-case scenario and expecting life to fall apart. Sometimes you might become so panicked and overwhelmed that your heart races, your breathing becomes labored, and your whole body tenses up. As a result, you might be thinking of talking to an anxiety therapist.
Anxiety Has A Way Of Making Your World Feel Small
One of the hallmarks of anxiety is avoidance. Because of how stressed you are, you might find yourself going out of your way to avoid any situations that could trigger your anxiety. Perhaps you’ve been turning down social invitations, calling out of work more, and finding any excuse not to leave your house. When people ask why you didn’t come to their social gatherings, you might lie simply to avoid having to tell them that you’re anxious. It’s not that you want to be dishonest; you just feel embarrassed admitting that anxiety is the reason you didn’t go.
Over time, this kind of life can begin to feel limiting and hold you back from your true potential. Your world could start to feel small, as anxiety prevents you from going after new connections and new opportunities. It could even compromise your immunity and physical health, leading to stomach issues and various aches and pains.
If you want to free yourself from the shackles of anxiety and put it in its rightful place, we encourage you to pursue therapy with us. At Milford Counseling, our therapists are here to help you regulate your stress levels, reduce catastrophic thinking, and live a more authentic and empowered life.
Anxiety Is A Normal Part Of Life, But It Can Quickly Become Dysfunctional
Everyone feels anxious from time to time. In some ways, anxiety isn’t always a bad thing—it can help you stay alert, motivated, and prepared for dangerous or stressful situations. The question to ask yourself is: how dysfunctional is your anxiety? How much is it controlling your decision-making? Does it come and go in ebbs and flows, or is it breaking you down?
If you’re reading this page, there’s a good chance that anxiety is negatively impacting your life. And you’re not alone—roughly 40 million American adults suffer from an anxiety disorder.* That means that one in every five people you meet is likely dealing with anxiety.
None of this is surprising—after all, we live in a turbulent, stressful time in world history. Between economic hardship, political upheaval, and a global pandemic that created a wealth of new health anxieties, we’re all a little on edge right now. As a result, the demand for therapy has increased dramatically.
Many People Try To Solve Anxiety By Avoiding It, Which Only Makes It Worse
Most of the best tools for resolving anxiety are counterintuitive. They involve slowly building up the courage to face your fears instead of avoiding them. Yet few people end up trying to confront their fears—after all, it’s human nature to avoid that which makes you anxious. That’s why many people rely on Xanax, Valium, and other medications to treat their stress. It’s easier to slap an emotional band-aid on your struggles than to try and understand them or process them.
Gaining the courage to face your fears is incredibly hard. But with the help of a compassionate therapist in a safe, supportive environment, you can learn to confront your anxiety in a way that doesn’t aggravate your symptoms or add to your stress.
Therapy Can Help You Put Anxiety In Its Place
Since anxiety is a normal human experience that can often serve a useful purpose, the goal of therapy is not to get rid of it. Instead, we want to help you reduce anxiety’s impact on your life. Our aim is to help you step back and look at your anxiety rationally, creating space between you and your thoughts and feelings. This way, you’ll be able to notice when you slip into negative thought patterns like catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking. You’ll be able to watch rather than react, allowing you to live more mindfully and thoughtfully.
At Milford Counseling, our approach to anxiety treatment is deeply holistic. We’ll look at sleep, exercise, journaling, eating habits, and every area of your life, enabling you to experience complete and comprehensive healing. Our practice even has two certified therapy dogs, Maizey and Ruby, who are deeply and intuitively loving and bring a lot of calmness to the therapeutic space. We do everything we can to ensure that our clients have a safe, soothing environment where they can learn to manage anxiety better.
What To Expect In Anxiety Counseling Sessions
Generally, the first step of anxiety treatment is psychoeducation. After all, you can’t treat what you don’t know. We want to help you understand what anxiety really is, how it affects you, and what you can do to loosen its grip on your life. By increasing your knowledge of anxiety, you can learn how to stop anxious thoughts when they arise and break out of negative spirals before they even start.
To help you overcome the negative spiral of anxiety, we often draw from an approach called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The goal of CBT is to help you distinguish between distorted thinking and accurate thinking. You will learn to challenge the catastrophic, all-or-nothing thoughts that make your anxiety worse, assessing whether your fears actually reflect reality or not. And when you change your thinking, your emotions and behavior generally follow suit.
Our practice also uses Exposure Therapy, which focuses on slowly building up the courage to face your anxiety in a safe, neutral setting. By gradually confronting your fears in the therapy space, it will become easier to confront them in the real world. And we’ll give you mindfulness skills to help you stay calm and grounded when your fears arise, allowing you to be more present in the moment and stop getting caught up in worries about the future.
By drawing from a wide range of interventions and equipping you with the tools to regulate your stress, we are confident that we can empower you to get control of your anxiety so that it no longer controls you.
You May Have Some Questions About Anxiety Therapy…
What if talking about my anxiety makes it worse?
We go out of our way to make sure therapy is welcoming, comforting, and goes at a pace that’s right for you. You’re in charge of the treatment process, so you never have to talk about something you’re not comfortable with. That said, anxiety can’t get better if you avoid it. By discussing your anxiety with a trusting and supportive therapist, you can gradually reduce the intensity and frequency of your symptoms.
Why can’t I just manage anxiety by myself?
Trying to overcome anxiety on your own is like being on a hamster wheel. Just when you think you’ve made progress and finally put your anxiety to rest, another situation comes up that makes you anxious all over again. To break out of this pattern, sometimes you need the help of a compassionate professional. The right therapist can provide in-depth psychoeducation about how anxiety affects you personally, helping you avoid falling into repetitive and unhealthy patterns.
What if I don’t connect with my therapist?
When we do our pre-screening, we’re very careful about matching you with the right specialist. What’s more, our therapists always make sure to take their time with clients, listening to them, getting to know them, and learning from them. We’re not here to throw answers at you—we want to establish rapport and understanding. And if by any chance you don’t connect with your therapist, we have many other practitioners on staff who can assist you.
Let Us Help You Live A More Authentic And Empowered Life
You don’t have to keep going in circles trying to manage your stress. At Milford Counseling, we’ll give you real-life tools for boosting your confidence and living with more pep in your step. To connect with one of our anxiety counselors, you can use the contact form or call us at (248) 529-6383.
