When Worry Starts Taking Over

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health concerns, affecting millions of adults each year. But anxiety doesn't always look like panic attacks or obvious fear. It can show up as constant overthinking, difficulty shutting your mind off, irritability, tension, trouble concentrating, avoiding situations, needing reassurance, or always preparing for what might go wrong.

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Some anxiety is a normal part of life. It becomes a problem when worry and fear begin influencing your decisions, relationships, work, sleep, or ability to enjoy what's happening around you. You may even recognize that your thoughts aren't completely rational while still feeling unable to stop them.

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Why People Seek Help for Anxiety

People come to counseling for anxiety for many different reasons. You may be dealing with constant worry, social anxiety, panic, relationship anxiety, work stress, perfectionism, fear of failure, difficulty making decisions, or anxiety surrounding a major life change.

For others, anxiety is less obvious. You might find yourself replaying conversations, questioning whether you made the right decision, looking for reassurance, trying to control situations, or thinking several steps ahead in an attempt to prevent something from going wrong.

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Over time, living this way can be exhausting.

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Understanding Your Anxiety

When I work with anxiety, I want to understand more than what you're anxious about. We look at how your anxiety works.

What triggers it? What thoughts immediately follow? What are you afraid might happen? How do you respond to that fear? And what do you do to make the uncomfortable feeling go away?

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Sometimes the things we do to reduce anxiety in the moment, such as avoiding, overthinking, seeking reassurance, checking, controlling, or preparing for every possible outcome, can unintentionally keep the anxiety going.

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Understanding that cycle gives us somewhere to intervene.

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A Practical Approach to Anxiety

My approach is active, collaborative, and practical. We'll work on understanding the connection between your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors while developing strategies for responding differently when anxiety shows up.

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Depending on what you're experiencing, we may work on challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, reducing avoidance, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, separating thoughts from facts, managing physical symptoms, establishing healthier boundaries, and learning how to respond rather than react to anxious thoughts.

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We may also explore the deeper fears underneath the anxiety. Sometimes the worry on the surface is connected to something more meaningful, such as fear of rejection, failure, embarrassment, losing control, disappointing someone, or simply not knowing what comes next.

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Learning to Trust Yourself Again

The goal of anxiety counseling isn't to eliminate every anxious thought or make sure you never feel uncomfortable again. Anxiety is a normal human emotion.

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Instead, we'll work toward changing the amount of control anxiety has over your life.

I want you to become better at recognizing when anxiety is driving your thinking, deciding whether the fear actually deserves your attention, and moving forward even when you don't have complete certainty.

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Ultimately, the goal is not to build your life around avoiding anxiety. It's to develop the confidence and skills to know that when anxiety shows up, you can handle it.

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Real strategies. Meaningful change.