What is anxiety?
Everyone experiences anxiety. For most people, these feelings come and go once in a while. For some people, these feelings are more than just passing worries. Your anxiety may stick around and can get in the way of being present in your daily life.
What are the symptoms of anxiety?
Anxiety symptoms can look different for each person. When you feel anxious, your body revs up, scanning for possible danger and activates your fight or flight response.
Some common symptoms of anxiety include nervousness, restless or being tense. You might feel fear or dread. You might experience your heart racing, headaches, stomach upset and problems sleeping.
It can be hard to focus on anything other than what you're worried about.
When to seek help with your anxiety?
It’s not always easy to tell when anxiety is a serious issue.
If you feel like you’re worrying so much that it's become hard for you to control and is interfering with your personal and/or professional life, it might be a good time to learn some new ways of dealing with your worrying thoughts.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been shown to effectively treat anxiety. It gives you a new way of understanding and thinking about your problems.
It’s exhausting to be thinking the worst might happen and trapped in your fears and doubts.
You can train your mind to think and respond differently than you have in the past.
By transforming your patterns of negative thinking, you can improve the way you feel.
CBT aims to shift your outlook by focusing on thoughts and beliefs about yourself, others and the world that contribute to your emotional distress.
Cognitive strategies are geared to transform anxious thoughts and negative self-talk into realistic and productive thoughts and beliefs.
With practice, CBT can help you get to a point where you can do this on your own.
Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Anxiety
The anxious mind is always clouded by past painful experiences or negative predictions about what might go wrong.
Anxiety robs us of contentment and accepting the present moment.
It's important to have relaxation or "de-stress" strategies that are accessible whenever you need it.
Actively practicing calm and peace slows things down and offers you a choice about how you want to respond to your worries.
The more your brain and body are relaxed, the easier you can access the tools and skills needed to transform anxious thinking. As your peace and calm "muscles" become stronger, they tend to overtake the anxieties and fears you have.
Mindfulness techniques not only help anxiety and stress, but actually change the structure and function of your brain to make it healthier.
Regularly practicing mindfulness can rewire how your brain responds to stress and anxiety.
You can learn to recognize and stop worrying about the future or ruminating about the past.
Instead of following a worrying thought down the black hole of worst possible negative outcomes, you can learn to recognize the pattern and let it go.
This trains your brain to be less anxious and improves your overall well-being.