Many people suffer from anxiety, and don’t realize that ignoring the problem or relying on medicine isn’t treating the root cause of the issue. A therapist has a multitude of ways to help you deal with these issues while teaching you how to resolve them by yourself. This is why i put together an article explaining How can therapy relieve my anxiety?
What is anxiety?
Anxiety can manifest itself in many ways, but the discomfort it causes is clear. Anxiety is most often characterized as feelings of worry, self-doubt, fear, stress, and any mixture of these. It’s a normal reaction to many circumstances and has become increasingly common in our society. Many experience these emotions passingly, but being exposed to this for a prolonged time can have severe consequences on your physical health, mental well-being, and other aspects of your live. Physical symptoms vary from stomach aches to tense musculature, and go as far as full-blown panic attacks. Life can be much more complicated, and medicine helps to a certain extent, but psychology is the field most apt to treat this.
Perspective:
Anxiety is often characterized by a few emotional responses that when left to their own devices can worsen the problem. One of these is repetitive thoughts and emotions, which repeatedly expose you to the same ideas and only make the problem worse. A therapist can help a lot by discussing the problem and giving you a different perspective on your feelings, or the problems which gave rise to them. Being able to have someone listen in and give you a 3rd person perspective without all the emotional bias we carry living our lives can help change our points of view and make the emotions or problems seem normal and manageable. Anxiety can blow daily circumstances out of proportion in our minds and make it seem as though there’s nothing we can do about them, but this is very rarely the case.
Brainstorming:
Since anxiety often causes our perspectives of issues and emotions to be distorted, this in turn distorts our abilities to deal with said emotions and problems. A Psychologist is someone you can trust to listen to what you’re going through and help you think of ways you could deal with these issues. People are very quick to ask acquaintances and others for help and emotional support, but a therapist is a trained individual who will help you deal with your current situations while preparing you for the future. Although the immediate relief that therapy causes may seem like reason enough to proceed with the treatment, the main goal is to teach you to deal with your emotions by yourself in the future.
Prevention:
One limitation of experiencing your life from within your mind is that our perspective of ourselves, and of our emotional processes are extremely limited. Throughout your life you develop mechanisms to deal with any problems you encounter. These mechanisms are then automatically used to cope with future problems, but sometimes a solution to one problem isn’t the best way to solve another. A Psychologist is trained to guide your, and help give you that extra perspective which can go a long way in preventing you from becoming anxious in the first place. One example of this is isolation; many people become withdrawn in their own minds and this allows your thoughts and emotions to get hijacked by anxiety. Having someone who keeps an eye on how you react to different stimuli, and can give you tips to prevent a small feeling from growing is one of the biggest boons of therapy.
These are only a few ways that a healthy relationship with a therapist can help relieve not only anxiety, but many other conflicting emotions daily life can bring. I hope you found this article helpful, and know I’m always available for consulting!