Anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders, and yet, many people never seek treatment for their anxiety. Anxiety can significantly reduce your health and quality of life, regardless of if you have mild to severe anxiety. While stress is a normal part of life, if you’ve been experiencing persistent stress accompanied by chronic feelings of restlessness or nervousness, you may be struggling with anxiety.
If you suspect you may have anxiety, you may be wondering, “does therapy help with anxiety”. In this article, you’ll learn more about what is anxiety, how does therapy treat anxiety, and the different treatments available to better manage your anxiety symptoms. At Sanctuary Wellness, we are an inpatient mental health facility committed to helping patients better manage their mental illness symptoms and take back their life.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you on your road to recovery.
What is Anxiety?
We all experience stress from time to time. However, anxiety occurs when you persistently feel intense worry or fear almost daily from rather everyday situations. Anxiety disorders can vary from social anxiety to separation anxiety, specific phobias, or even more generalized anxiety disorder.
Anxiety disorders can present themselves in a range of signs and symptoms, including:
- Persistently feeling nervous or restless
- Increased heart rate
- Breathing fast
- Excessive sweating
- Trembling
- Having difficulty sleeping
- Having the urge to avoid things that may trigger your anxiety
How Does Therapy Treat Anxiety?
If you suspect you may be struggling with an anxiety disorder, you may be wondering “Does therapy help with anxiety”? Therapy can significantly help improve your anxiety and better manage your symptoms, especially if you are struggling with more moderate to severe anxiety. Therapy can help you unlock or learn why you may have certain fears surrounding a certain situation in the first place. For example, if you have fear and anxiety around driving a car, therapy could help you potentially uncover why you may have that fear in the first place.
Therapy can also help you learn healthy coping strategies to effectively deal with your anxiety. For example, if you have anxiety around driving in a car, this can significantly reduce your quality of life, especially if you need to drive but can’t because of your anxiety. However, therapy can help you learn strategies to slowly overcome your anxiety and be more comfortable driving in a car. This may look like you doing exposure therapy in which you slowly expose yourself to sitting in the car, then driving around your street, etc.
Therefore, therapy can help not only uncover why you may have these intense feelings of fear and worry in the first place, but therapy can also help you learn healthy strategies you can do to better manage your anxiety symptoms.
Common Examples of Therapy Treatment For Anxiety
There is a range of therapy treatment options available to help better manage your anxiety symptoms. Depending on the type of your anxiety disorder may impact the forms of therapy treatments that may be most effective in managing your anxiety symptoms.
Common examples of therapy treatment for anxiety include:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
- Exposure therapy
- Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)
- Psychodynamic therapy
- Art or music therapy
- And more
Again, depending on the type of anxiety disorder you may have will influence which therapy treatment option may be best for you. For example, if you have anxiety surrounding a specific situation like a fear of driving, exposure therapy may be one of the most beneficial forms of treatment for you to gradually become more comfortable driving again.
Start Your Road to Recovery
Now you know more about how does therapy help with anxiety and the different treatments to help improve anxiety. Stress is a part of life; however, if you’ve been experiencing persistent feelings of intense worry or fear, and have even been avoiding certain situations because of your anxiety, you should consider seeking therapy treatment for anxiety.
Therapy can help you not only learn more about why you may have an anxiety disorder in the first place, but therapy can also teach you healthy coping strategies you can implement to gradually ease your anxiety and get back to living a healthy, happy, more balanced quality of life.
Sanctuary Wellness is an inpatient mental health treatment center committed to helping patients treat their mental disorders and regain control of their lives for good.
Struggling with mental illness? Contact us today to learn how we can help you on your road to recovery.