Anxiety Disorders
Leave Worry Behind, Embrace the Adventure of Life’s Journey.
Navigating the realm of anxiety is a universal experience, touching the lives of us all. Despite its discomfort, anxiety serves a vital purpose by signaling potential threats to our well-being. In moderation, it boosts performance and prompts future planning. However, when anxiety is triggered too easily, escalates beyond manageability, or persists, it can disrupt our ease and functionality.
Understanding Anxiety: Anxiety manifests as apprehension, nervousness, and worry about future events or perceived dangers. Physical symptoms, including muscle tension, a racing heart, shortness of breath, and sweating, often accompany it. Persistent anxiety may lead to irritability, sleep difficulties, and impaired concentration. Severe cases may result in panic attacks, marked by intense fear, physical symptoms, and cognitive distress.
The Struggle with Anxiety: Individuals grappling with anxiety may fear internal sensations, uncertain outcomes, and perceive themselves as ineffective and unprotected. Beneath the surface, many feel deeply vulnerable and insecure.
Consequences of Anxiety: Beyond its immediate impact, anxiety takes a toll on relationships, wears down our bodies, and hinders our potential for happiness. It prompts us to limit our lives, avoiding tasks, experiences, or relationships that could bring fulfillment. Anxiety can leave individuals feeling discouraged and powerless, convinced that change is beyond their control.
Hope Through Psychotherapy: The good news? Psychotherapy offers a highly effective avenue for addressing and alleviating anxiety. Discover how treatment can empower you to regain a sense of calm, embrace possibilities, and lead a more fulfilling life. Don’t let anxiety hold you back. Take the first step towards a happier, healthier you. Reach out for help now.
Read about Effective Treatment for Anxiety.
To learn more about specific types of anxiety, please follow the links below.
Specific Types of Anxiety
Do you…
- Worry constantly about everyday things (e.g., financial, work-related, health, family)? – Read about Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- Fear being negatively judged or doing something embarrassing in front of others, causing you to avoid or dread certain social situations? — Read about Social Anxiety Disorder
- Worry about having intense, unpredictable panic attacks with physical sensations that make you believe you’re losing control or having a heart attack? — Read about Panic Disorder
- Fear being in situations that might be difficult to leave, or where no help is available, in the case of panic-like or embarrassing symptoms? — Read about Agoraphobia
- Have persistent and excessive fear of specific situations or things that you try to avoid at all times? — Read about Specific Phobia
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, psychotherapy might be an effective way for you to manage and overcome your anxiety. Read about Treatment for Anxiety.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Worry in moderate amounts has an adaptive function as it can help prepare us to solve problems and take action to overcome obstacles. However, a tendency to worry excessively and uncontrollably about numerous topics (e.g., relationships, family, finances, work and illness) can signal that something is wrong. It can also lead to symptoms such as high levels of tension, finding it difficult to relax, fatigue, inability to concentrate, irritability, and insomnia. Excessive worry and these associated symptoms often leave people feeling exhausted, helpless, hopeless and demoralized.
People who describe themselves as chronic worriers often avoid emotion and “live in the future”, given that worry is future oriented. Additionally, the research literature suggests that excessive worry is linked to being fearful of uncertainty, even when the probability of a negative event is low. People who worry excessively often ask ‘what if’ type questions to themselves, which only serves to highlight the possibility that negative and harmful events may occur. Over time, individuals recognize that they are caught in a longstanding pattern of overestimating risks and overestimating negative consequences; however, the more attempts to gain control and prevent negative events from occurring, the greater one worries. Research has indicated that treatment targeting intolerance of uncertainty can be beneficial for managing uncontrollable worry as well as learning to tolerate upsetting thoughts and feelings.
Social Anxiety Disorder
Social Anxiety Disorder is one of the most common anxiety disorders. Individuals with social anxiety experience intense fear in situations in which they may be exposed to scrutiny by others such as in social interactions, being observed, or performing in front of others. These situations prompt worry about potentially behaving in a way or showing symptoms of anxiety that will be embarrassing or judged negatively (e.g., fear others will view them as weak, incompetent, a loser, boring, unlikeable). Their anxiety is often accompanied by physical sensations such as blushing, sweating, and ‘freezing’.
People who have social anxiety describe being self-conscious, feeling as if they are in the spotlight. They often avoid situations that trigger their anxiety such as attending social events, meeting unfamiliar people, making small talk, dating, giving a presentation, participating in a group discussion, talking to people in positions of authority, expressing thoughts and opinions and asserting oneself. Social anxiety can lead to isolation, loneliness, reduced satisfaction and intimacy in relationships and may be a barrier to school and/or work-related achievement.
Panic Disorder
A key feature of Panic Disorder is repeated and unexpected panic attacks that occur in the absence of any identifiable danger. A panic attack involves a brief period of intense fear along with experiences such as racing heart, chest pain, dizziness, shaking, feeling of unreality, difficulty breathing, etc. Panic attacks become intense quickly and are accompanied by a sense of imminent danger or dread and an overwhelming urge to escape.
While many people have at least one panic attack in their life, Panic Disorder involves repeated panic attacks as well as persistent worry (e.g., about having further panic attacks) or changes in behaviour (e.g., avoiding situations that might trigger panic symptoms). For example, individuals with Panic Disorder often worry that their attacks indicate the presence of a life threatening illness (e.g., cardiac disease) and may make excessive visits to their family doctor or emergency departments. Others worry about embarrassing themselves, fainting, losing control or fearing the onset of a psychotic disorder. Such fears typically lead to avoidance of situations or places associated with past panic attacks or where they predict another could occur.
The cycle of fear and avoidance in Panic Disorder often leads to a narrowing of one’s sense of safety and comfort and a reduction in activities. Furthermore, individuals become acutely aware of normal bodily functions; this type of monitoring results in more scrutiny and interpretation for the early signs of a panic attack, which can create a constant state of hypervigilance, worry, and emotional exhaustion.
Without treatment, Panic Disorder may lead to chronic anxiety, unnecessary medical visits, and Agoraphobia, as well as reliance on medications (e.g., benzodiazepines such as Ativan/Lorazepam, Rivotril/Clonazepam, Xanax/Alprazolam,). Although benzodiazepines can provide some relief and a greater sense of security in the short-run, they can represent a form of avoidance and may erode one’s sense of efficacy. Psychological treatment, particularly CBT, has been shown to be clinically effective for Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is a mental health condition marked by intense anxiety related to being in places or situations where escape may be challenging, and assistance may not be readily available during the onset of panic or other distressing symptoms, such as loss of bowel control or vomiting. This apprehension commonly prompts individuals to avoid various scenarios, including crowded spaces, queues, elevators, isolated areas, traffic congestion, tunnels, buses, airplanes, trains, movie theaters, and being alone at home or too far away from it.
For some individuals with agoraphobia, facing these situations is possible but comes with overwhelming discomfort and anxiety. Coping strategies may involve positioning themselves close to an exit for a swift getaway or having a trusted family member or friend accompany them. The impact of agoraphobia on daily life can be substantial, leading to challenges in employment, travel, completing essential tasks like grocery shopping, and attending appointments.
Specific Phobia
Specific phobias are characterized by intense and excessive or unreasonable fears related to a specific situation or object (e.g., small enclosed spaces, flying, needles, heights, spiders). People will usually do whatever they can to avoid the uncomfortable and often terrifying feelings associated with their phobia. This avoidance may make it difficult for them to go places they would like to go, or may interfere with work or social activities.
Treatment for Anxiety
People who suffer with anxiety disorders struggle with, avoid, and run away from their fear and anxiety. Research has shown that the most effective interventions for anxiety focus on helping you gradually approach and face what you fear and to allow and experience your feelings as opposed to avoiding through distraction, escape, or shutting down.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is the most extensively researched psychotherapy for anxiety and has repeatedly demonstrated effectiveness for the range of anxiety disorders. Important therapeutic tasks involve developing alternative explanations for the causes and consequences of symptoms, challenging old beliefs, assumptions, and predictions that contribute to anxiety, and establishing more adaptive coping responses such as challenging fears directly through in vivo/real life exposure (i.e., confronting feared situations), interoceptive exposure (i.e., exercises to engage feared bodily symptoms), and imaginal exposure (i.e., confronting feared memories, images and emotions). Exposure helps to increase individuals’ tolerance for emotional discomfort and fear as well as gain confidence as they encounter situations they had previously avoided. CBT helps individuals move outside of the safety zone constricting their life to achieve their goals and live more in the present.
Emotion Focused Therapy also helps people directly engage and work with core fears and anxiety in the session as well as learn how to regulate and self-soothe in adaptive ways. Individuals are helped to actively experience and change unproductive ways of relating to themselves that contribute to anxiety and to modify core emotional states of vulnerability and insecurity underlying anxiety. Change occurs through accessing adaptive inner resources and needs that can transform a sense of oneself as weak and unable to cope, or as unsafe and alone. These processes lead to a more empowered and competent sense of self, greater awareness and skills for regulating anxiety and other emotions, and to ways of relating that are more accepting and compassionate.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) aims to change the relationship you have with your unwanted experiences such as negative thoughts, emotions, memories, and physical sensations. Treatment involves gaining an awareness of your attempts to control, reduce, and avoid experiencing anxiety and compassionately learning to accept and move toward your fears. ACT helps you to clarify and choose a direction in your life that truly matters, which may have been put on hold due to feeling stuck in anxiety and fear. Finally, ACT is focused on committed behavioural change that involves taking steps and acting in a way that is consistent with your goals and values.
Mindfulness strategies have increasingly become recognized as an effective source of intervention to address a range of concerns such as chronic pain, mood, and anxiety disorders in both group and individual therapy. Mindfulness interventions are typically integrated into treatment for anxiety disorders rather than used as a standalone therapy.
Please contact us to find out more about treatments for anxiety disorders.