Anxiety can make life feel like a struggle. In this article Linda Hoinville explains how the anxiety cycle maintains your anxiety, and how counselling can help you to break free to build a more satisfying life.
Anxiety is a normal response to anything that feels dangerous, it prepares our body to fight or flee, but when we feel under continuous threat from conditions that seem uncontrollable our anxiety can spiral. We can experience physical and emotional symptoms, we might feel dizzy, sweaty, agitated or irritable, it can lead to poor sleep and impact on our ability to focus, life can feel challenging and out of control.
The anxiety response developed in our predecessors to help them avoid immediate threats in their environment. Nowadays we often feel overwhelmed by ongoing stressful circumstances that we feel unable to control. Because we believe we cannot escape we avoid these situations, or use distractions like alcohol, food or work to take our mind off what is worrying us. While these avoidance approaches help to reduce our anxiety for a while the threat is still there, in addition we do not learn that that these uncomfortable feelings and thoughts will change if we stop struggling against them. Avoiding our fears allows our anxiety to grow, it feeds the vicious cycle between the unconscious sensations in our body and our worrying thoughts.
Overcoming anxiety is not easy, the initial activation of our body is not under our conscious control, and trying to control our worrying thoughts can makes them worse. Counselling can help you recover from anxiety by changing the way that you respond to the anxious sensations in your body. Your counsellor can help you to accept the uncomfortable feelings in the short term so that you can reduce your distress in the long term and let go of your worrying thoughts.
If anxiety is impacting on your quality of life, relationships, or your ability to work reaching out for help could be the first step in your recovery from anxiety. It could be your opportunity to confront your fears and take control of your anxiety rather than letting it control you.
In the full article Linda explains in more detail how the anxiety cycle works and how counselling can help you to break free from this cycle to create a more fulfilling life.
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