Anxiety Therapy
Does Anxiety Make It Hard To Enjoy Life?
Do you consider yourself high functioning, but you’re still burning the candle at both ends? You may feel accomplished, but deep down, you just feel too stressed and burnt out to enjoy what you’ve achieved. Perhaps you are also juggling parenting and challenged by raising children while pursuing a career.
You might also feel shame since you aren’t as happy or content as you think you “should” be. As a result, you probably wish you could pause from your busy life, take time to focus on self-care, and wonder if anxiety therapy is needed. Even though things seem okay on the surface, you’re still anxious about the future and living in a state of nervous anticipation.
Anxiety Prevents You From Listening To That Small Voice Inside You
you’ve been stressed out for as long as you can remember, your anxiety may manifest both emotionally and physically. You may experience physical fatigue, trouble sleeping, and difficulty making it through the day without feeling exhausted. Perhaps you try to quiet your anxiety and shame by being more productive. But the more you try to keep busy, the less room you have in your life for joy, relaxation, and self-care.
You may also struggle with insecurities and need constant reassurance that what you’re doing or thinking is okay. Yet even when you get the reassurance you need, you just go right back to square one and end up just as stressed as before.
Perhaps you have lost the ability to be spontaneous, and while you may hear that small voice inside you that wants to create, explore, or try new things, you are so loaded with responsibilities and obligations that you ignore it.
What would life be like if you could prioritize your health and well-being more regularly? If you could wake up, quiet your mind from racing thoughts, and not feel that familiar dread, you’d probably feel like yourself again. Meeting with a counselor at Inside Psychotherapy can help you manage your anxiety and experience peace of mind no matter where you are in life.
We All Experience Anxiety From Time To Time
Stress and anxiety are common, and a mild amount of anxiety is helpful for our survival, like when we need to avoid something to keep us safe. When anxiety persists even when danger is not present, however, it becomes unhealthy and counterproductive. Nearly 30 percent of people will have some form of unhealthy anxiety in their lives at some point. (1)
One of the most common reasons people are so anxious is the culture of hyper-productivity and delayed gratification. As adults, it’s not surprising that we learn to delay our joy until we eventually deny ourselves of it entirely. Furthermore, the current climate of high demands on parents, with infinite information on how to parent “better,” has become untenable for well-meaning caregivers.
Our Society Prioritizes Productivity At The Cost Of Our Mental Health
Modern life creates many issues that compound anxiety and make it more likely to become a problem. The demands on our time and attention with 24/7 media input hamper our ability to slow down and pay attention to our most basic needs.
The nature of remote work has offered a lot more flexibility for many people professionally but has blurred the lines between work and personal time, making the potential for recovery from burnout a challenge. What makes matters worse, some cultures praise and highly regard overworking yourself and prioritizing accomplishments over self-care and rest.
It’s hard to know when an intervention like therapy could provide relief, as it’s natural to gravitate to the familiar, even if it perpetuates your stress. But the truth is that falling back on familiar behaviors like avoidance or hyper-focusing on work won’t get to the source of anxiety. Anxiety counseling can allow you to break the patterns that have kept you from living your best life.
Therapy For Anxiety Can Help You Prioritize Self-Care
At Inside Psychotherapy, we’ll challenge your negative self-beliefs and celebrate your victories. Meeting with a therapist for your anxiety can help bring your wish to live well back into focus while giving you helpful insights into the resistance and discomfort that comes up along the way.
We will explore the origins of your core issues in terms of what you learned as a child, what behavioral models you saw, and how you felt rewarded or unrewarded in your upbringing. You’ll have a chance to think about how you want to spend your time, energy, and resources. Over the long term, our goals are to integrate more mindfulness and joy into your life, as well as to deepen contentment both personally and professionally.
Therapy Can Help You Identify What You Want In Life
We often look for what we call ”marching orders” during our sessions, which is a phrase from the teachings of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. We’re listening for you to tell us what you really want in life. The “homework” between sessions often includes an activity that evokes your hopes and wishes.
Mindfulness for anxiety is one of the main approaches we use to treat anxiety, drawn from mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy. It’s not uncommon to “treat” your anxiety symptoms by staying busy. We will work together to find ways for you to slow down and assess what is really happening, and what is contributing to your anxiety. Mindfulness has been shown to be an effective tool to manage anxiety, and we see that time and time again in our work with clients.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety is another approach we draw from in our practice, which usually begins by identifying patterns in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Once we notice the patterns that aren’t serving you, we’ll start looking at ways CBT can help you manage anxiety both cognitively (in your thoughts) and behaviorally (through your choices).
Solution-Focused therapy for anxiety involves envisioning the future you want and actively working toward reaching that reality. We will take small steps over time, as this process is not meant to overwhelm you or add more burdens to your life.
It’s very common to continue with dissatisfying patterns before seeking treatment because that is how you have avoided the anxiety of feeling inadequate up to this point. Counseling at Inside Psychotherapy can help break the repetitive behaviors of anxiety and find new habits and coping skills that support the life you want to live.
You May Still Have Questions About Anxiety Therapy…
I can’t take the time for therapy because I am too busy juggling everything in my life.
It’s hard to imagine how taking a pause from your hectic life and reassessing the habits you have in place can help you find more fulfillment. Our society often teaches us that pushing ourselves relentlessly is the only way to succeed.
Our work is to integrate more balance and mindfulness into your pursuit of success. It seems counterintuitive, but when you infuse more rest and pleasure into your life, you will likely actually accomplish more, and you will thrive.
How long will the therapy process take?
The length of our therapy relationship varies from person to person but we recommend starting with one session per week. There’s no commitment up front in terms of duration, so you can schedule and pay as you go. Sometimes counseling can be short-term and solution-focused, while other times it can go on indefinitely because it’s more concerned with deeper healing.
I’m worried I won't reach my goals because I feel stressed out all the time.
Chronic stress and burnout are real problems that we shouldn’t brush over as simply collateral damage from living an ambitious or goal-oriented life. The truth is that even if you reached your goals or professional benchmarks for success, it’s likely that you still wouldn’t feel happy and fulfilled. Therapy can help you explore ways to pursue your aspirations while keeping your wellness and mental health a priority.
You Don’t Have To Keep Spinning Your Wheels Trying To Manage Anxiety
You deserve to live well and we can help you bring that priority back into your life. Reach out to Inside Psychotherapy at 917-310-0512 or use our online form for a free, 15-minute consultation to learn how our therapy practice can help you manage your stress and anxiety.
