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Anxiety can serve a function, such as when it motivates you to prevent or mitigate a problem. However, when anxiety is in the “driver’s seat,” it can cause you to tailspin by limiting your creative thinking and keeping the anxiety alive and growing.

If you have been living with intense anxiety, you may have found your enjoyment of life to be limited. You may be avoiding situations or activities to prevent anxiety or panic attacks from occurring. That avoidance provides relief from anxiety – temporarily – and that relief makes it more likely that you will avoid those situations again. Over time, this can become quite limiting. You may begin to feel that your options for work and relaxation are narrowing, and this can be tremendously frustrating.

Many people experience a chronic sense of anxiety with frequent questions of “what would happen if…?” Unlike planning, which leads to a strategy involving what you can control, persistent anxiety tends to put you on a loop of thinking of things beyond your control, which understandably leads to more anxiety.

Fortunately, a great deal is known about how anxiety works. For instance, we know which parts of the brain are activated during anxiety, which neurochemicals are released, and how we can regain control so that anxiety doesn’t control you. 

In psychotherapy, we may explore:

- how anticipation of anxiety is affecting your decisions about what to engage in and what to avoid,

- how anxiety becomes its own feedback loop,

- specific tools that are known to reduce anxiety in the moment, 

- ways to regain control of your thoughts when anxiety appears, and

- how to engage in previously avoided activities that are important to you.