Anxiety Counselling

“The figments of my imagination are out to get me”

Anxiety plays out in the body. Symptoms can include panic attacks, sweating, high blood pressure, palpitations. That said it’s caused by the power of our inner emotional mind to completely overpower our more logical mind, it’s our response to an imagined fear, worry or unease. The significant word here is “imagined”. Someone loses their job and can’t pay their mortgage or feed the family, that’s “stress”. I don’t think the boss likes me, I’m going to lose my job and not be able to pay the mortgage or feed the family, that’s “anxiety”.

Unlike stress though anxiety doesn’t fade into the distance once the threat is mediated. Anxiety hangs around for the long haul and can cause significant impairment in social, occupational, and other important areas of our functioning. By being anxious we believe we’re preventing some negative future outcome. It’s a peculiarity of the human condition that we believe that by worrying or being anxious we’re actually doing something, we’re not. Anxiety makes worrying transportable and invasive! Because anxiety is not grounded in a real and present danger we try to lessen the upsetting, unsafe feelings, by looking for certainty through control.

The good news is that anxiety is a learned response and as such can be relearned in a way that’s effective for problem-solving without being detrimental to our mental or physical well being.