Anxiety is a warning system in our bodies that alerts us to potentially dangerous or bad situations, from outright danger to making sure we keep our deadlines and do the things we need to do to live a healthy and safe life.
Anxiety, however, can also affect us in a negative way, we can perceive danger where there is none or feal ill at ease when we are safe and secure. Anxiety can make us obsess and worry about situations that may never happen or are not even likely to happen. It put us in the mind frame that we have offended or upset somebody and to overthink, both in our personal or professional lives.
Anxiety can appear in many ways.
Anxiety can be caused by many things, almost too many to mention. Our mind is always on the lookout for us. Think of a mind like a computer that solves problems. Now imagine that if that computer started trying to anticipate problems just in case it needed to solve them. This sounds very practical for a computer, but it can be a cause of anxiety when the mind does this.
Now why would the computer or our mind go into overdrive? This can happen if we have gone through a traumatic event or a long/medium period of extreme stress. This in turn can cause our brain to go into overdrive, looking for the next thing to go wrong. It is often why, even if the stress is gone away, we are left with the anxiety, ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’, even if there is no shoe.
It can be due to a hectic lifestyle or perhaps a chaotic family background. Anxiety can also be caused due to a change in circumstance or a transition in life. Such transitions can be; first time living away from home, moving country and settling in a new foreign place, the end of a relationship, even the beginning of a new one, the start of a new job or the ending of an old one etc.
The first thing to do in therapy may seem the most obvious, we must figure out what is causing us anxiety? For those of us that have a clear idea of what is causing us anxiety, that is great, however, many of us are not aware of what is causing the feeling of anxiety within us. Sometimes we even have an idea of what is causing us anxiety but the event or situation that we believe is causing us the anxiety may only have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. In therapy, we will look at increasing awareness, awareness of ourselves, our lives and how we as individuals work. Through psychoeducation and increasing awareness we can create a care plan and identify techniques and lifestyle changes that can be of benefit for the rest of our lives. In therapy we will identify, where in the body you feel anxiety and learn to listen to these early warning signs and what to do when we notice them.
