What exactly is anxiety?
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health struggles that people may experience in their lifetime. There are different types of anxiety including: generalized anxiety, panic, social anxiety, and phobias, among others. Most importantly is how you are feeling.
Anxiety can mean different things for different people, from feeling extreme amounts of worry and stress about everyday life, to episodes of intense panic, to struggles in social situations, to intense fear of a specific situation.
Anxiety often presents itself both emotionally and physically. You may experience uncontrollable worry, feel on edge or uneasy, feel like something bad is going to happen, feel anxiety that comes on and escalates really quickly and intensely, or have difficulty concentrating.
In your body you might experience things like racing heart, difficulty breathing, tightness in your muscles, nausea, sweating, and tingling in your hands or feet, among many others. This can feel extremely scary. Given all of this, it makes sense that people then avoid situations that trigger the anxious feelings.
It can also be very difficult because others in your life may not understand what you are going through and say things that are not helpful. Or maybe you experience a lot of anxiety internally, but work really hard so that others don’t see what is happening and you are functioning at a high level. That very often leads people to feel lonely and exhausted.
Anxiety or “normal” life stress?
But hold on, don’t we all experience stress and anxiety at times in our life? Yes. But when it’s very intense, doesn’t go away, and/or impacts functioning in various aspects (e.g., relationships, work, school)of your life, it may be a good idea to seek professional help.
Counseling for anxiety:
I am glad you are here. We can work together to help you develop evidence-based coping skills for managing these struggles, as well as ultimately get you to a place where your life is not controlled by these feelings. This also may mean looking at improving various lifestyle habits to get you to the healthiest place possible.
It is extremely hard to do this type of thing on your own when you are struggling and feel like these symptoms are taking over your life. Anxiety can often leave a person feeling very out of control.
Developing some tools that get you back to feeling in control again is a very important part of the recovery process. I respect you moving in a direction towards healing. Just reading this is one of the first steps! I welcome the opportunity to partner with you on your healing journey.
