Counselling for Anxiety
Anxiety is a feeling of worry or fear. It is a normal response to a range of different situations.
Your mental health can be affected when you feel anxious every day and cannot remember when you last felt relaxed.
Anxiety starts in the mind and in our thinking, but can create very real and tangible symptoms that affect everyday life.
What causes
Anxiety?
Anxiety stems from our ‘flight or fight’ response. This happens when our body feels as if it is in danger.
The fight or flight response is an automatic reaction which we have no control over. Our bodies release hormones, such as adrenaline, to make us more alert.
Normally when the threat has gone our body triggers different chemicals to help us relax. We will calm down after the adrenaline rush.
However, with the anxiety fight or flight response, this tends not to happen. We habitually read fearful situations as if they are dangerous. We think there is a danger, but there is not. That is when we become anxious.
What does
Anxiety
feel like?
Anxiety can show itself in a range of physical signs, such as an increase in heart rate, muscle tension, dizziness, sleeplessness, hyperventilating, and wanting to use the toilet more. These are caused by the hormones released by the fight or flight response.
Some of these can be a normal reaction to external stresses, but they can be a problem when they start to happen regularly.
These feelings can interfere with your life, seem out of proportion, and can be very distressing.
How can
counselling
help?
A counsellor can support you to explore what you are going through and why you feel as you do. They can help you find ways to overcome your anxiety that work for you.
In person-centred counselling we start by looking at what is going on for you, what your experience of anxiety is like, and then try to understand it together.
We may be able to understand what is causing and triggering these feelings of anxiety.
Counselling for anxiety involves challenging ways of thinking about life and anxiety that may not be helpful to you.
It also involves working with your reactions to stressful situations and helping you to slow down the physical response that causes anxiety.