Anxiety and fear can protect you from danger. Anxiety is something that keeps us alert to challenges we may face – and is both necessary and normal.
However – and this is a big however because it can ruin your life – excessive anxiety can become as big a nightmare as any chronic illness – and needs to be sorted. There’s nothing wrong in seeking help with anxiety and usually the sooner the better. Otherwise the anxious behaviour can make you feel more anxious!
The resulting tension in the body can result in many physical symptoms such as headaches & chest pains. For a list of anxiety-driven, physical symptoms see here, which is half-way to understanding how you can control them. Without that, if the feelings of fear overwhelm you, you may experience a panic attack. For more details about panic attacks click here.
Remember help with anxiety is available. Getting counselling for anxiety to see how it makes you feel, can be the first step in breaking the cycle of fear and insecurity. You will make more progress if you can avoid trying to tackle it from an anxious position! This is where it is helpful to be talking it through with an anxiety counsellor. If you want help to explore your anxiety with a therapist click here.
What Can You do to Help?
A. In the meantime, simple areas that you can usefully look at include the value of regular exercise & sleep, which are elaborated here.
B. If you want to get more in depth help with anxiety it can be useful to understand your underlying patterns of thinking and behaviour that generate the anxiety as detailed here. We often need a sense of personal control over our life, but we can innocently go about that in ways that actually make things worse. Panic attacks, phobias, obsessive-compulsive behaviours and post-traumatic stress reactions are all forms of out-of-control anxiety and if not addressed they can lead to feelings of being depressed as well.
C. If you are working with an anxiety therapist you can uncover what the cause of the anxiety & fear is, and really work to resolve and eradicate any underlying issues. This is where anxiety therapy can really help.
Body Reactions
The evidence-based, neuroscientists tell us what is happening in the body – chemically if you like – when we are feeling anxious. When you feel under threat, anxiety triggers the release of hormones, such as adrenalin, followed by a string of bodily actions that will help us prepare to fight, or take flight. Now if the anxiety is imagined, then we have blood pumping round our body getting us charged up ready for action, when there is nothing we actually need to do, and we can then end up unnecessarily hyperactive.
Anxiety Counselling: Psychological Effects
Anxiety can make you more fearful, alert, on edge, irritable, and unable to relax or concentrate. In turn, these worries can affect your sleep, appetite and ability to concentrate. You may feel an overwhelming desire to seek the reassurance of others, drink or drugs, and feel weepy and dependent. You can see how important it is to find ways of interrupting it as it can feed on itself and you can develop addictions without really trying. Therapy for anxiety can help explore other ways of managing.
Reconnecting with your body in deep breathing and exercise helps you reconnect with the reality of your own breathing patterns and helps to ground yourself. Getting help, such as therapy for counselling, can provide a perspective on things that you have lost.
Anxiety Counselling: What help can I get to deal with this ?
An anxiety therapist can help you interrupt your cycle of anxiety. It will provide the opportunity for you to share your concerns and make more sense of them together, so you can both identify and tackle the underlying issues – reclaiming your own confidence.
If you are in Birmingham, contact BCPC who have therapists working with anxiety who will be very pleased to work with you and support you in reducing your levels of anxiety. We also have therapists around the country so if you are not near Birmingham, we may have someone in your area that is an anxiety counsellor. We also provide ONLINE THERAPY if it is difficult for you to visit a therapist for any reason. To access that click here.
Other areas of support are :-
- Anxiety UK: 08444 775 774
- The British Psychological Society: 0116 254 9568
- No Panic: 0800 138 8889
- Self help books
- BACP
- UKCP