Anxiety can take many forms and is as unique as the individual who is experiencing it. Anxiety can be mild or severe, for some a general feeling of being on edge or for others a full-blown panic attack which leaves them frozen in place. Anxiety can be described as a feeling of unease like a worry or a fear of a threat or perceived threat. Anxiety is experienced by everyone at some point in their lives. Anxiety is a warning system that something is wrong, and this is something natural which we need to activate our fight, flight or freeze response which is essential for our survival. When we were hunter-gathers this response allowed us to assess a threat and act. We have different lives for what this response was designed for. Not many of us will encounter an angry bear on the way home from work. Anxiety can if left unchecked can rob us of the joy of life and cause physical illness. If you would like to find out more about how anxiety and stress effect the body, episode 1 of Limitless on Disney+ is a good place to start.
Counselling can help anxiety in several ways. Many of us know that simply by talking through a problem we feel better as we let go of the problem a bit and stop it rolling around in our head. This is the first way that counselling can help. In a counselling session you don’t have to filter the problem as you are do not have to worry about burdening others. You can say exactly what you are feeling or thinking or dealing with without any judgement at all. The gift of just saying it like it is, is a great benefit to mental health. We tend to go through life with masks on, due to fear of judgement. Putting on these masks uses energy that when we are anxious, we might not have.
Counselling helps anxiety by letting us sit with the way we feel rather than push it away. In adult life we are told to be rational and use our intelligence to figure things out. In doing so we ignore what our feelings are telling us, and these feelings can build up over time making us feel worse. By paying attention to the way we feel we are paying attention to another source of information. There are 3 main sources of information we have access to, our thoughts, our feelings and how the body feels. If we pay more attention to all 3, we are giving ourselves the most information available to make the decisions we need to make.
Another of the ways counselling can help anxiety is learning techniques to control the physical symptoms of anxiety. Some of you may have heard of box breathing. This is a technique that can be used to lower the heart rate when we feel it beating too fast. You breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4 and breathe out for a count of 4 and then hold for a count of 4 and then repeat for as long as it takes to feel a difference in your heart rate. It takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it, but it can be useful for anything from a racing heart just before a job interview to a panic attack.
Counselling can also help anxiety by giving us space to sit and think about what options we have. Life can be busy, and we never have enough time. Counselling makes a set time on a regular basis to have that time to think about what we want to do next. We night be anxious about a restructuring within the organisation we work at and are unsure what this means for our future career. Do we stay at the same company and look at the options within the restructuring for our career or do we also look at the options outside of that company? These are big changes and sometimes we need to give ourselves the space to think these through without someone else telling us what we should do.
Contact me to find out more at info@forcounselling.co.uk.
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