Anxiety Treatment

Are You Overwhelmed By Constant Worries?

Are you always dwelling on the past or worried about what’s going to happen in the future? Do you have difficulty shutting your brain off and find yourself frequently overwhelmed with racing thoughts? Maybe this pattern results in uncomfortable anxiety symptoms, such as heart palpitations, sweaty palms, or ringing ears. Sometimes, these physical reactions might even make you feel as if you’re going crazy or as if you’re detached from your surroundings. Maybe you don’t know why you feel so on-edge, but nothing you try seems to help. Overall, do you simply wish you could calm these distressing thoughts and avoid viewing your worries as a sign of failure?

Living with an anxiety disorder is an exhausting experience. Maybe you’re continuously worrying about parenting or family dynamics, your eating habits, or how you are perceived in social interactions. Perhaps you’re especially hard on yourself if you feel you haven’t said something perfectly to a friend or if you feel that you can’t live up to the expectations of everyone around you. As a result, you might have trouble sleeping or wake up already exhausted and dreading the day ahead. You might be so consumed with analyzing the future or past that you find it impossible to act, make decisions in the present or relax, no matter how hard you try.

Many People Struggle With Anxiety

If you’re dealing with an anxiety disorder, you might feel like the only one struggling with constant worries. However, anxiety is actually one of the most common issues for adults, annually affecting nearly a fifth of the population of the United States. In a culture increasingly defined by stuffed schedules and constant stimulation, it’s no wonder that so many of us have trouble slowing down and shutting off.

Anxiety can come from many sources. Major life transitions, such as having children or a death in the family, are common causes of overwhelming worry. Alternatively, the foundations of anxiety can often be laid at a young age through bullying at school, especially harsh teachers, an unstable family life, or another difficult experience. It’s common for these factors to turn into chronic anxiety in adult life.

In moderate levels, anxiety is actually beneficial, warning us of danger and motivating us to accomplish important tasks. For example, worrying about an oncoming car prompts us to look before crossing the street. However, too much anxiety is a problem, paralyzing and preventing us from enjoying our daily lives. Luckily, relief is possible. If your ability to act is increasingly crippled by anxiety symptoms, counseling with a qualified professional could help you slow down and regain control of your thoughts.

Anxiety Treatment Can Help You Rediscover Inner Calm

With the compassionate support of anxiety therapy, you’ll find a safe space to learn more about how anxiety functions, treat surface-level symptoms, and dig deeper into the root cause of your racing thoughts. Through our regular counseling sessions, we can move beyond your feelings of failure and low self-worth and begin to rebuild the foundations of fulfillment and joy.

Our anxiety treatment will begin with a look at your daily patterns, such as your thought patterns, your sleep hygiene, eating habits, work schedule, and even the dynamics in your most important relationships. By starting here, we’ll be able to identify possible changes to your daily routine that can start relieving anxiety symptoms right away. To complement this work, I’ll also help you practice effective relaxation techniques, such as mindfulness meditation, guided imagery, Heartmath, EMDR, and/or deep breathing, while also directing you to appropriate outside resources, including functional MDs, yoga classes, or even acupuncture and massage. This way, we can establish effective relaxation and self-care techniques both inside and outside of therapy sessions.

Once we’ve begun working on surface level relief, we can start addressing and resolving the deeper root cause of your anxiety. To do this, we might explore your life history to examine what kind of past events, especially childhood experiences, might be triggering your present anxiety. During this practice, I’ll encourage you to approach your memories in your adult state rather than always reverting to a childlike perspective. By doing so, we can begin to reverse your anxious thought patterns and increase your ability to stay in the present and avoid ruminating on the past or the future.

Everyone’s anxiety manifests in different ways, and I’ll always tailor my approach to meet your unique needs. With 15 years of anxiety counseling experience, along with certifications in yoga, HeartMath, and utilizing EMDR therapy, I’m confident that I can help you overcome overwhelming worries and find lasting calm in the present moment.

You might still have objections to anxiety treatment…

I don’t want to do deep breathing or practice mindfulness meditation. I don’t think they work!

It’s natural to be skeptical of holistic medicine and mindfulness techniques, especially if you’ve never tried it before. However, it is worth trying these techniques before completely discounting them. There’s a reason why people have used mindfulness philosophy and yoga for thousands of years, and there’s a reason why these practices are becoming increasingly popular in our fast-paced modern world. These tools are proven to provide lasting relief, especially when it comes to calming your mind and improving your relationship with yourself and others. And, in my sessions, we’ll never try intense mediation for extended periods of time. Usually, quick deep breathing exercises lasting a few minutes are enough to calm your mind.

I don’t want to take medication.

Many people resist coming to therapy because they don’t want to be forced to take anxiety medication, and this fear is perfectly normal. That’s why I never suggest clients take medication until every other possibility has been ruled out. I’ll always try to remedy the situation holistically, and I would always prefer to refer you to a Naturopath, Functional MD, or another holistic practitioner, rather than immediately opting for medication. There can be physical causes to anxiety such as inflammation, thyroid dysfunction, adrenals imbalanced, vitamin or mineral deficiency, microbiome disruption, toxins/metals present, and blood sugar regulation problems. These physical challenges should be ruled out before going on a medication to treat the symptoms.

I don’t want to spend a long time in therapy.

It’s true that therapy requires some time, and it’s common to assume that you don’t have room in your already busy schedule. However, when weighing the costs of anxiety counseling, it’s important to consider how long you’ve been struggling with uncomfortable, distracting symptoms. Anxious thought patterns and feelings of failure don’t disappear overnight, especially if you’ve been dealing with them for many years. These issues don’t have immediate resolutions, but we can work on finding relief from your symptoms relatively quickly. Overall, you owe it yourself to devote time to healing.

Are you ready to find peace in the present instead of worrying about the past or future? Contact me today for a free phone consultation utilizing my online scheduler or calling me at (860) 920-7070. You can ask me any questions you may have about my anxiety treatment practice online and in Simsbury, CT.