Anxiety Therapy

When anxiety gets out of control, anxiety therapy can help manage and get to the root of its cause

While a measure of anxiety is normal, an issue arises when that anxiety becomes out of control and overwhelming. This experience of anxiety can be painful and even crippling. Like a fire alarm, anxiety is usually telling you something is wrong and needs attention. Anxiety becomes out of control when you always feel as if something is wrong, or that something is wrong to a level that doesn’t match the reality of a situation. Tribeca Therapy offers in-person anxiety therapy, as well as secure online therapy for New York residents.

While every treatment plan for anxiety is different, we typically see anxiety therapy as two parallel tracks: The first involves learning concrete interventions for managing anxiety as it comes, including when it’s always or nearly always present. These include getting skilled at recognizing triggers, identifying the process of anxiety early, and making changes in behavior and thinking, such as self-talk, creating distractions, reaching out to others who can help tackle the anxiety, and healthy coping skills like physical exercise.

However, anxiety doesn’t just need to be managed. Even when it feels overwrought, a signal of anxiety can mean there are things in your life that need to be looked at and reorganized. Good anxiety psychotherapists should work to understand what the anxiety is telling you: What relationships and conditions are causing the anxiety? What habits make you vulnerable to anxiety? What is the relationship between anxiety and difficulties getting close to others? Did you grow up in an anxious family and learn it? Were you scared a lot or experienced excessive worry as a kid, and didn't get help?

While a measure of anxiety is normal, those who struggle with anxiety can keep confronting the world’s challenges in an anxious way

There is a lot to be anxious about in our world: violence, political and economic uncertainty, the pursuit of a happy life and finding a secure place in the world, and worries about kids, family, relationships, or jobs. Even taking good risks and transitions, like a new job or a new step in your relationship, can bring anxiety. As with these concerns, anxiety can be situational, but even as situations change, people who struggle with anxiety tend to confront the many challenges of the world anxiously. Once there is a resolution to one stressor, they end up suffering from symptoms of anxiety about new things. 

Part of what makes anxiety so challenging to treat is that a measure of anxiety is an essential part of life. As with many emotional experiences, anxiety has an adaptive function in our emotional lives. When we take on a new challenge or when a new challenge is presented to us, a modest amount of anxiety—or even a good deal of anxiety in the case of serious challenges—is expected, can be helpful, and doesn’t necessarily need to be treated with anxiety therapy. If you’re taking on new challenges and doing things that are a bit too hard for you, then you can bet you’re going to be anxious. This anxiety is a result of putting yourself in a position to grow.

Anxiety is one little word that covers profoundly different types of anxiety

Our anxiety therapists understand that we’re asking this one little word—anxiety—to do a lot of work. Everyone who comes to our NYC therapy office needs such a profoundly different kind of help for anxiety. Anxiety can look a million different ways, including:

• Stress: Many use the terms stress and anxiety interchangeably. In the case of anxiety therapy for stress, a complaint of anxiety commonly denotes physical symptoms, like exhaustion, difficulty sleeping, fast or irregular heart rate, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, headaches, or other kinds of physical tension; or problems in relationships, like difficulty controlling one’s temper, outbursts, or irritability with friends and loved ones in daily life. Anxiety that is expressed as stress is a killer, can destroy relationships (along with brain cells), and is not a necessary part of living a successful life.

• Social anxiety: For some, anxiety is experienced the most in social situations. This is commonly referred to as social anxiety or social phobia. For some, this can be inexplicable, while for others, it can be the product of repeated rejections earlier in life that impacted self-esteem. Moving past social anxiety involves learning how to be in the world with other people.

• Panic: Panic attacks are acute episodes of intense anxiety, generally lasting anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour (or, in extreme cases, longer). It is important to remember that panic itself is an ordinary, expected reaction to traumatic experiences; what makes panic a panic attack is when the panic seems inordinate when related to the circumstances surrounding it. Most people who come into therapy for panic disorder have difficulty isolating any proximal cause. 

  Chronic anxiety and panic attacks often go hand in hand. We treat them similarly, with the first track involving concrete skills for preventing and minimizing the attack, and the second involving a broader project of exploring and ridding crippling anxiety from one’s life.

   

• Trauma: Anxiety can be one of the ways that trauma manifests. When you experience a traumatic event, you can often experience anxiety related to that trauma for months or years afterward. In some cases, this can result in a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, which is an anxiety disorder. Though this word can be intimidating, we find it important to leave the question of what constitutes trauma open to the broadest possible interpretation. Many who experience anxiety dismiss proximate experiences (“It wasn’t really so bad”), but traumatic experiences are traumatic, no matter how much they get minimized.