Anxiety

Therapy for Anxiety

Anxiety is an expected and normal part of development. It’s an innate response that is helpful and protective for us in certain situations. For example, anxiety can actually bolster and enhance our performance in certain situations. Feeling anxious before taking the SATs motivates you to study more in the weeks leading up to the test, which will likely result in the achievement of a higher score. Anxious responses can also alert us when we are in danger and need to be cautious. So when does anxiety become problematic? Essentially, anxiety becomes problematic when it starts interfering with life on a daily basis. Anxiety is no longer adaptive when it causes distress and negatively impacts social, academic/employment and family functioning. Approximately 25.1% of children/adolescents and 18.1 % of adults over the age of 18 meet criteria for an anxiety disorder. However, a far larger percentage of the population struggle with anxiety symptoms at some point in the lives without meeting full criteria for a diagnosis.

Core Features of Anxiety

What does anxiety look and feel like? Anxiety manifests itself in three distinct but interrelated ways: observable behaviors, bodily sensations and thinking patterns. Avoidance is the most notable and prominent behavioral manifestation of anxiety, and is characterized by staying away from feared situations or objects. This included not wanting to talk about or think about the feared situation or object. Other behavioral manifestations of anxiety include fidgeting, shaky voice and a rigid posture. The second feature of anxiety are somatic or physiological responses such as sweating, flushed face, ‘butterflies in the stomach’, trembling and an increased heartrate. The third characteristic of anxiety is maladaptive or unhelpful thinking patterns. These thoughts take the form of excessive worry or rumination, and the content can be about specific things (i.e. heights, public speaking) or more disparate ones. One common anxious thinking patterns is expecting bad things or the worst to happen. Regardless of the content of anxious thoughts, the worrying tends to be persistent, excessive and is difficult to control.

Other Features – Attentional Bias

Another common characteristics of anxious individuals in a tendency to focus on objects in their environment that are threatening or dangerous. For example, someone who is fearful of social situations will be more likely to interpret facial expressions in a negative way when meeting people for the first time. An unfortunate consequence of this bias is a tendency to be hyper-vigilant of such feared situations and objects, which is both time consuming and debilitating.

Anxiety Symptoms

Treatments

Effective treatment for anxiety includes cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in either individual or group format. Numerous randomized controlled trials support the use of CBT to reduce symptoms of anxiety across different disorders. Common features of these interventions include relaxation techniques, cognitive coping (flexible thinking patterns), in-vivo and imaginal exposures, contingency management and problem-solving.