Anxiety

Twisting and turning with no relief.

Anxiety feels like a tight knot you can’t untwist.

Your body feels exhausted, but your mind’s wide awake and racing. Heart pounding, sometimes you get dizzy or nauseous.

Your mind is on fire, overthinking, and over-analyzing every little thing.

It keeps you up at night, tossing and turning. It’s like a lightbulb that comes on at the most inconvenient times and won’t switch off.

You worry about issues over which you have no control…

… events that happened in the past and about things that you fear may happen again.

You have no patience with others.

Friends and family tell you to “relax, let it go,” but that makes you feel worse. They don’t understand how consuming this all feels.

And now it’s starting to impact your relationships and your job. You can’t concentrate, and your productivity is shot.

You’ve tried everything to make the anxiety stop, and nothing helps.

Can’t seem to shake that feeling.

Afraid, but unsure why – the more you try to push it away, the worse it gets. Just the thought of feeling anxious seems to trigger more anxiety.

Many of us have no idea how anxiety works – we know it feels awful. But here’s an interesting piece to anxiety… it can become a habit our brains create to make ourselves feel better. The bad news is that it doesn’t work… the good news is we can consciously tap into this habit formation and create a different outcome.

Becoming mindful helps shake that feeling.

My approach utilizes mindfulness to help clients recognize anxiety as a form of habitual behavior. Mindfulness is about bringing awareness to our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, and recognizing that these are just thoughts, just emotions, and just physical sensations.

Creating space between what we are experiencing at the moment and the awareness of that experience can help us relax into anxiety rather than feel some overwhelming urge to make it go away, which paradoxically makes it worse.

We map out your habit loops around your anxiety by identifying the triggers, the behavior, and the result.

The framework for this process is supported by an app that you will use for daily homework outside of session. I’ll ask you to describe a recent event where you experienced anxiety. What was going on before you began to feel anxious? Was there a specific event that transpired? Perhaps you had been ruminating about a past or future event that triggered the anxiety. It may have even been a dream that woke you in the middle of the night and left you feeling shaken and fearful. Maybe it was a difficult conversation – or just the thought of a difficult conversation.

Next, we will explore what you did. Did you try to make the anxious feeling go away? What sorts of behaviors did you engage in? Did you pace? Did you eat something? Did you call someone? Did you drink a beer? Did you go for a run? What was the outcome of these behaviors? We will explore these patterns and help you become an expert on your habitual anxiety so that you can manage it in real-time.

I will teach you to connect to your anxiety in a new way, and you will learn practical skills to help lessen the physically uncomfortable grip of anxiety. It sounds counter-intuitive but developing mindfulness skills and paying attention to your anxiety (as opposed to trying to distract yourself) creates a shift in your experience that essentially provides new information to your brain.

Old habits are replaced by healthier ones.

As you learn to lean into your anxiety, you unlearn the habits that keep anxiety building upon itself.

I can help you break anxiety’s hold on your life.

By tapping into your brain’s natural reward-based learning, we will hack the very system that sets up your anxiety patterns.

Life is too short to be ruled by anxiety.

I can help you step out of the habit loops and into a new, healthier relationship with yourself.

Call (601) 498-8263 today for a free, confidential 20-minute phone consultation. Together, we can map the way forward.