Anxiety Counselling
Learn new skills and ways of thinking.What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a normal emotional response that most of us experience as part of our day to day lives.
Anxiety can be described as an unpleasant feeling that we might describe as feeling ‘uptight’ ‘nervous’ ‘irritable’ or ‘wound-up’.
When we are feeling anxious we can often experience physical sensations that can include:
- Increased heart rate
- Muscular tension
- Sweating
- Trembling
- Feelings of breathlessness
Anxiety is caused by a variety of factors including:
- Life events: e.g., bereavements and loss, life changes, work and/or personal pressures, relationship problems, trauma, situational factors such as starting college or starting a new job or any situation where there are expectations and pressures that are new or unfamiliar to you.
- Thinking styles: Sometimes the way we think about ourselves and our experiences can contribute to increasing and prolonging anxiety, e.g., expecting the worst thing to happen, fearful of being exposed, embarrassed etc., over-thinking and/or ruminating about situations.
- Evolutionary & Biological reasons: Anxiety/ stress can have positive benefits and humans have evolved to be mindful of threats to our safety and survival. The stress response (fight – flight – freeze) triggers chemicals into our bodies to keep us alert when we perceive danger is present. We also develop behaviours, attitudes and personality traits based on our biological and environmental influences as we developed. Some of these can be helpful and unhelpful.
Debilitating Anxiety
Sometimes a person may experience anxiety that is debilitating and may prevent them from enjoying their daily lives. Anxiety is undoubtedly an unpleasant feeling, but it is something that everyone experiences. Of course, some people experience anxiety more regularly than others. Due to the unpleasant nature of anxiety, people often worry that experiencing it is harmful. For example they may fear that regularly worrying will make them go mad or that the physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g. heart racing) are signs of a serious health problem. Sometimes a person may experience acute physical anxiety attacks in what is commonly described as ‘panic attacks’. Panic attacks can be very frightening for a person as the physical symptoms are intense even though they are short lived. Such fears naturally make people even more anxious which creates a vicious cycle of anxiety.
How Counselling can help you Deal with Anxiety
Most daily occurrences are not life threatening and therefore learning how to change how we view and think about ourselves and our experiences can help to reduce anxiety and anxious responses.When exploring anxiety with your counsellor you can learn to understand that it is a very healthy response which actually helps to protect us. By learning more about anxiety and why we experience it in the first place, we can see that it is not harmful. This can help us to be less fearful of the symptoms which in turn has a positive affect on our overall anxiety levels. Counselling also helps you to learn new skills and ways of thinking that can reduce the harmful symptoms of anxiety. Your counsellor will help you to:
1. Understanding more about anxiety.
2. Learning how to challenge your unhelpful thoughts and see things in a more realistic light.
3. Improving your problem solving skills.
4. Learning how to reduce the amount of time you spend worrying.
5. Learning how you can feel more relaxed (physically and mentally).
6. Learning how to stop avoiding the things that make you anxious.
Contact Access Counselling Clinic at 01 5240708 and we can chat to your further about getting an appointment with a specially trained therapist.