TEL AVIV

Anxiety Therapy

Anxiety doesn’t have to be a life sentence.

 

Anxiety and panic attacks are overwhelming. They can leave you feelings like you are dying, wondering why your chest won’t stop hurting. Sometimes anxiety exists as racing thoughts keeping you up at night. Anxiety can harm your relationships, cause you to fight with your friends and family. You may be constantly afraid of when the next panic attack will come, monitoring yourself constantly for any sign of panic.

Anxiety presents differently for different people. For some people having anxiety means finding themselves worrying over and over about something, or always trying to stay one step ahead and unable to relax. It may be a tightness in your chest, and your doctor tells you “go to therapy”. You may be feeling overwhelmed and trying to keep it all together. You may have digestive issues, vertigo, or constant headaches. 

However you are experiencing anxiety, it is miserable and you just want to find a way for it to stop. You want to feel calm, to feel happy, to feel carefree once again. 


Did you know that anxiety is both natural and highly treatable?

Anxiety is a natural human reaction. It is our brain’s way of trying to protect us. It is trying to keep us alert, to keep us looking out for things that might worry us. It’s as though we think that if we keep running through the situation repeatedly in our mind we may be able to find a better way to handle it. If we stay alert to any possible danger, we may be able to intervene faster.

This small amount of anxiety is normal in life. It keeps us on our toes, it keeps us present and alert and well functioning in the world. 

Anxiety only begins to be a problem when it is interrupting your life. At a certain point anxiety stops being effective at keeping us safe and instead it simply tortures us. Your mind tells you not to stop worrying because it is needed to keep you safe. But instead, it is keeping you awake late at night and not letting you function during the day. You are tense and uptight all the time. At its worst it turns into a full-on panic attack that completely overwhelms you.

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Did you know that anxiety and panic attacks respond well to treatment?

There are 3 parts to treating anxiety. 

The first step of treating anxiety is learning to interrupt panic attacks and racing thoughts in the moment. This is a very body-based approach, because anxiety lives in your body. Fear is held in the tightness in your chest, in the fast breathing that comes with a panic attack, in the burning in your chest that wakes you during the night. So step number one of therapy is learning ways to calm your body and build a calm part in your mind that is able to step out of the panic attack. 

Panic and anxiety don’t affect us simply in their strongest moments. They impact us in the way that we dread the feeling even when it isn’t there. So many people have told me that they dread going into bed at night because the anxiety will appear. So they keep themselves up on their phone for hours, and never full calm down or sleep well. For other people, the dread of having a panic attack creates its own panic. When you start feeling anxiety build, you already begin to panic, worried that you are going to have a panic attack. So you panic some more, and the feelings get stronger, and then you panic more, and pretty soon it’s a full blown attack. This is what we call the vicious loop of anxiety. You aren’t only anxious but also anxious about being anxious. 

Working on step one will help step number two. Because as soon as you feel confident that you can handle a panic attack or anxiety, your fear of it will lessen. Then there are targeted tools we will use as well to address the debilitating worry about the anxiety. As I said, all people have anxiety. It’s the way we feel about the anxiety that causes it to be harmful. So we will learn new ways to interact with the anxiety. Yup, it’s a bit meta :) But it’s actually less confusing than it sounds when we do it, and it’s incredibly helpful. I know for myself I’ve found this the most helpful part of anxiety therapy, and I’ve heard this from many of my clients. It changes the way you view yourself and your anxiety. 

The third part of anxiety therapy is identifying and resolving the things under the surface that might be causing the anxiety. Often, there is genuine background stress that is contributing to your anxiety. Dealing with this can support a lasting improvement in your life.

Therapy for anxiety can help you…

 

  • Respond differently to life stressors

  • Have tools to handle strong emotions

  • Get off the roller coaster of emotion

  • Feel in control of your life once again

You don’t have to feel this way forever.

FAQs

  • The first stages of anxiety therapy work uses primarily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), mindfulness and Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT) techniques, which are all practical techniques focused on managing thoughts and feelings. If these terms are not familiar to you, I’ll teach you all about what this means as we work together. As therapy goes on, we are likely to bring in interventions from schema therapy, trauma therapy work, and psychodynamic interventions to create a lasting change. At the start of therapy we will choose which interventions are best for you and I will explain to you what we will be doing and why.

  • Much of our anxiety is based on valid concerns. What brings you to therapy isn’t that you are worried, it is that your worry is impacting your ability to resolve the problem effectively and live your happiest life. In therapy we will learn about how to lessen your anxiety, and then find effective ways to intervene with the concern that is weighing on you.

  • This is different for everyone. Most of my clients begin to feel an improvement within the first few sessions. Creating enduring change can take 4-6+ months. This is something you and I will discuss together at the start of treatment and create regular check-in points to discuss.

  • A number percentage of my clients with anxiety use marijuana as a way of managing their anxiety. Self-medicating is a form of helping manage your anxiety. For many people, marijuana lowers their anxiety in the moment and helps them cope with daily life and unwind.

    Marijuana has two opposite effects. It lowers anxiety in the short term, while often causing anxiety in the long term. While I can’t speak to the pharmacological reasons behind this, one of the reasons it may do this is because you are quieting the worries without addressing them. So what we try to do in therapy is address the worries and interrupt that background build up of anxiety.

  • There is a lot of research suggesting that anxiety medication taken in conjunction with psychotherapy can be very effective. If this is something you already do or want to do, I support you in working with a skilled psychiatrist to find the right medication for you. Many of my clients have found this very helpful. With the right medical support, anxiety medications can be chosen for both short term and long term interventions. It’s up to you and your needs.