Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal emotion and considered a primitive type emotion. Humans and animals experience this emotion and throughout history it was an emotion that prepared people to respond to some kind of threat. The response may be to run, or to attack, or to freeze and submit. Today, the threats are not life threatening, so there are times when this emotion is overkill, but we all experience the emotion at some point.

Symptoms can include, racing thoughts, excessive worry, feeling uncoordinated, a fast pounding heart rate, sweaty palms, dizziness, sleep disturbance, high blood pressure, inability to make a decision and/or to concentrate, nightmares, and nausea.

In our world today there are many stressors, so if there is repeated exposure to anxiety we can become unwell and find life distressing. Unfortunately we can sometimes develop an anxiety disorder: there is generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder (sometimes with agoraphobia), social phobia or specific phobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder.

Regain Control with Anxiety Counselling

There is treatment for anxiety. Counselling can assist you with effective evidence based therapy to get symptoms under control, to self-sooth and to understand what may be triggering the anxiety.

Often depression goes hand in hand with anxiety. Sometimes you become depressed because of the anxiety, this is understandable. If this is the case we work to ease both anxiety and depression. A number of different strategies can be used to assist you to develop healthy ways to cope.