The Benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety

Your mind can sometimes work against you. Despite your best conscious efforts, you can find yourself having unwanted intrusive thoughts. Thoughts can keep rolling around in your head in an endless loop that keeps you awake at night. Though every fiber of your being desires peace, you find yourself bombarded by thoughts you know are overblown or irrational. Fighting against yourself can be disturbing and exhausting.

Anxious thoughts and feelings can be mild, signaling that you feel uncomfortable in a situation, but these can dissipate easily with time. However, anxiety hampers your ability to function well and perform daily tasks such as work, school, or having basic interactions with others. When anxiety becomes overwhelming, it can overtake your life. The good news, however, is there are treatments available for anxiety.

The Good and Bad News about Anxiety

Anxiety does perform a positive function in our lives. In a given situation, things can take an unexpected turn that could be detrimental to your well-being. For instance, as you’re driving on the highway, out of nowhere, another driver cuts you off and forces you to slam your brakes. Another example might be if you’re facing an evaluation tied to your future, your anxiety can help you focus and prepare for it.

When you feel anxious, it’s not always negative. It’s how your body helps you to prepare for situations that may be considered threatening or dangerous. Danger can be physical as well as existential, like the threat of losing a job or a romantic prospect. These are good things, and being anxious can play a positive role in you taking steps to prepare and act for your benefit.

To a certain point, feelings of anxiety can be a blessing. High-performing athletes will feel “nerves” before a big event, but they will typically interpret it as excitement. Anxiety can put you on edge in a good way, preparing your body to act by increasing blood flow, tensing muscles, and sharpening focus.

Beyond a certain point, anxiety stops being helpful and becomes a hindrance. Your anxiety can be overwhelming to the point that it makes you self-conscious. You might also experience such severe symptoms of anxiety that you’re unable to focus. Instead of acting, you find yourself feeling stuck or paralyzed. Anxiety can be so intense that it stops you from doing the stuff of everyday life.

Determining whether your anxiety is good or bad depends on the intensity of the symptoms you experience, and whether you have the tools to cope. Certain circumstances ought not to trigger severe fight-or-flight responses. If that happens with intense symptoms that linger for a long time, it’s possible that you have an anxiety disorder and should seek help from a professional.

The Effects of Anxiety

When you experience anxiety, there are many different things that your body is doing. Your brain processes fear and other emotions through the amygdala. Often these can trigger a physiological response before you’ve even had time to formulate a rational response to the situation. This is why we’re susceptible to jumping when scared or can feel frightened momentarily by something that turns out to be a pile of clothes on a chair.

When you feel anxious, your body responds with a heartbeat faster, giving you abdominal discomfort and digestive issues. It can make you feel tired, giving you asthma-like symptoms like shortness of breath. Your physical reaction to anxiety may make you restless and irritable. Likewise, you may have racing thoughts or ruminate, resulting in forgetfulness or difficulty concentrating. Anxiety could drive you to compulsive and avoidant behaviors.

When you find yourself experiencing anxiety and it’s more than you can handle, it can impact your daily life. Anxiety can make you lose enjoyment in activities or hobbies that interested you before. Your performance at work or school may decline and it can also end up reducing your productivity or motivation to get things done. Likewise, anxiety can lead to strained relationships with loved ones.

Health conditions are also born out of anxiety because your body is not meant to be in fight-or-flight mode indefinitely. It’s one thing to have your heart pound for a few minutes after you encounter a life-threatening situation, and quite another if it comes regularly, triggered by ordinary, everyday situations. It’s not uncommon for issues like cardiovascular disease or a weakened immune system to be the result of being constantly anxious.

Constant anxiety and intense worry can affect your sleep, cause hormonal imbalances, and worsen conditions like asthma or skin problems like eczema, psoriasis, and acne. The gastrointestinal issues caused by anxiety can also become significant and long-term problems like ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. Conclusively, anxiety can, in the short and long term, affect your well-being.

Bringing Anxiety Under Control

There are several ways to bring anxiety under control. Natural and self-help methods can effectively reduce the intensity and incidence of anxiety, while others are more professional interventions such as therapy and medication. Some self-help methods include learning mindfulness, doing deep breathing exercises to help calm you, and journaling to identify triggers and find an outlet for anxious thoughts.

Additional means of dealing with anxiety include regular exercise which helps to reduce the levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in your system and to elevate your mood. It’s important to find other ways to find calm such as doing the sorts of things that relax you. For some, that’s listening to music, reading a good book, getting a massage, or taking a bath. Healthy sleep habits also go a long way to helping you with emotional regulation.

Making certain lifestyle changes can also have a significant impact on anxiety’s effect on you. Changing your diet toward a more balanced diet, reducing caffeine, and adjusting your sugar intake makes a difference. Limiting your screen time and consumption of social media also helps because much of our anxiety is fueled by what we see and hear around us.

Establishing a daily routine, practicing gratitude, and being kind to yourself, are all strategies to combat anxiety. Also, setting realistic goals and priorities for yourself, learning to set clear boundaries, and spending time in natural spaces can all have a positive effect on your well-being and reduce feelings of worry.

In addition to these self-help methods to deal with anxiety, there is also professional help available. Depending on the severity and cause of your anxiety, there are several therapies available, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

In some circumstances, medications such as SSRIs and benzodiazepines may be required to bring the symptoms of anxiety under control. These medications will be coupled with therapy and the self-help techniques mentioned above.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety

Focusing specifically on one of the therapies that are useful for dealing with anxiety, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is highly effective in treating anxiety and anxiety disorders. CBT helps an individual to identify unhealthy and unhelpful patterns of thought and behavior, replacing these with other behaviors and thought patterns that promote well-being.

Some of the CBT techniques used for addressing anxiety include cognitive restructuring, which is when negative thoughts are reframed and viewed differently. Exposure therapy gradually exposes the individual to feared situations or anxiety triggers and effective coping mechanisms are developed to deal with these situations. Relaxation techniques like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and mindfulness-based interventions are also in CBT’s toolbox.

Around 50-75% of individuals who use CBT experience significant reductions in their symptoms. CBT is as effective as medication when dealing with mild to moderate anxiety, and over the long-term it can be more effective than medication for addressing severe anxiety.

An advantage of CBT over other treatments includes the fact that it can be used effectively over a short period, typically between six and twenty sessions. CBT can thus be cost-effective while having a low risk of side effects when compared to medications that are often prescribed to reduce the symptoms of anxiety. CBT is also flexible because it can be combined with other therapies and medications.

The long- and short-term benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety include the following:

• Reduces the severity of symptoms in a sustained manner.
• Improves quality of sleep.
• Develops problem-solving skills and coping strategies to deal with anxiety.
• Increases self-awareness and understanding of anxiety.
• Enhances emotional resilience, regulation, and stress management.
• Identifies and challenges negative thought patterns.
• Reduces avoidance behaviors.

Getting Help

If you or a loved one struggles with anxiety, reach out to a counselor for help. Through CBT or other therapies, you can bring anxiety under control. Contact our offices today and we can get you started. We can make an appointment for you with one of the many skilled therapists in our practice.