Therapy for Anxiety & Stress

Most people that are overly stressed, overly worried and more hurried about life often have some good reasons to be anxious, stressed and frazzled. 

While there’s usually some reason to point to, there’s also the fact that when we humans get uptight, anxious and stressed out we often find ourselves on auto-pilot, doing the same things over and over, even when they’re not helping.

Our automatic, reactive ways of coping often backfire on us and get us further stuck in the problem.  When the pressure is on our ability to hand stress goes way down and we tend to resort to two main options…

  • Try to Control It
  • Avoid It

Some examples of controlling or avoiding uncomfortable emotions and thoughts can look like the following:

  • being stuck anticipating & planning for the future
  • blaming yourself
  • distracting or ‘zoning out’
  • withdrawing & opting out of things that will likely make your life better or that you “should” do
  • using drugs/alcohol to get away from the stress of it all
  • perfectionism
  • avoiding conflict but then being resentful later
  • pretending like nothing is wrong to others

Hope in a New Way

Typically for most problems in life enough effort applied to it will solve it.  However, it’s common that people that struggle with anxiety don’t suffer from being lazy.  If they had a strategy that worked they’d be willing to work quite hard to lessen anxiety.

Anxiety, though, doesn’t seem to be able to be solved like a lot of other problems in life.  If you are reading this page, then your attempts so far to get rid of this stress haven’t made it so you can move on with your life yet.  The truth is that the human brain is not created well to deal with internal stress well.

Instead the brain is great at making sure you are kept safe from external threats (a bear or anything else that might hurt you).  You can’t run away from or defeat your anxiety by fighting it, the way you might deal with a bear.  Instead, you have the option of learning different skills on how to change your relationship to this stress and anxiety.