Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety

Anxiety can be both a crippling and motivating emotion. Every emotion that we experience serves a purpose. Anxiety in the correct amount helps us stay alert to danger and avoid things that can harm us. However, if anxiety is allowed to progress unregulated it can become a destructive and counter productive element in our lives. Unfortunately, negative anxiety is a very real issues that is affecting millions of people throughout the world. On average more then half of people living in the United States will experience a clinical episode of generalized anxiety.  The key to helping combat this pandemic of anxiety is to not avoid it through substances and negative coping skills. The key is to address it head on with proven techniques and discover how to turn that anxiety into a manageable part of your life. There will never be a complete cure all for anxiety. That is not how our mind and body functions. However, there is a correct way to experience anxiety.

The first way to begin to address your maladaptive anxiety is to address some of the negative behavior patterns you have that are exacerbating your symptoms. One of the first things I ask my clients that are experiencing anxiety is what their caffeine intake is during the day. Sure, it might sound silly but simple adjustments in behavior such as reducing caffeine consumption can have a great effect on how your body is reacting to anxiety triggers throughout your day. I tell clients that your body’s hormone response system does not know the difference between a very hard test that you are going to take and a lion that is chasing you. Our bodies fight and flight system was not developed to manage chronic daily mental stressors. It is hardwired to try and keep us physically safe and will react the same way to a stressful test as it would to a possible physical danger. Therefore, a great place to start to give your mind and body a fighting chance is to eliminate all of the things that will artificially elevate your bodies fight or flight response system. Some other examples of behavioral stressors that can be easily eliminated are, poor sleep patterns, alcohol, stimulants, heavy social media use, exposure to violent media content, exposure to prolonged violent video games, and the list doesn’t stop there. Another general behavioral change that can be addressed to help with anxiety is diet, exercise, and water consumption. I discuss the benefits that  these three things can have on your mental health in a previous article that can be found here The Mind Body Connection — Harvard Avenue Counseling Services, PLLC . Chronic inflammation can have extremely negative effects on brain and body function. There have been cases where individuals with food sensitivities have been able to greatly reduce, to even eliminate, rather severe mental health conditions by changes in diet and exercise.

Now that we have addressed the behaviors it is time to move to the thoughts. Cognitive interactions are based in chemical electrical interactions within the brain. Therefore, thoughts actually have a physical consequence within your brain. When we have a specific thought it sends a signal from one neuron to another and another. This specific signal that travels over a set of neurons is essentially what a thought is made of. Now if that signal (thought) is sent repeatedly it strengthens that neuronal pathway. This makes that type of thought more physically established in your brain. This is how learning and building memory works as well. However, when we are having repetitive negative thoughts, this unfortunately strengthens those negative thought pathways. Further adding to the issue of negative thought pathways is that our brain seems to have a bias towards promoting those negative anxiety inducing thought pathways. This is called the negativity bias. It is believed that this is present because our ancestors that tended to be a little more anxious about what might be behind that bush than their neighbor was were more likely to survive to pass along their anxious genes. So, I can see how after explaining all of this people might be thinking “so what your saying is all is lost then”, No! Just like you can build those negative thought pathways you can build positive ones and diminish the negative ones. There are several cognitive strategies that help individuals identify the triggers of negative thinking, stop that thinking, and actively work to replace it with positive thinking that will then begin to build those new positive thought patterns. However, these techniques are best learned and executed with a trained counselor who can help guide you through both the cognitive and behavior change process. Our counselors at Harvard Avenue Counseling Services are experienced in these Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques and look forward to helping our clients overcome their anxiety and negative thinking patterns.