Treating CBT for anxiety in St Neots involves examining your thoughts, feelings and behaviour patterns, and working out ways to remove yourself from these negative cycles. As a treatment, it mainly focuses on present concerns rather than earlier traumatic memories.
Essentially, anxiety and nervousness are rooted in survival, so feeling anxious or fearful is part of the human experience. Of course everyone experiences anxiety from time to time at varying degrees. Many times, intense anxiety, fear, or panic is caused by how we think about a certain situation and not necessarily the situation itself.
But when you can create space between a situation and your thoughts, feelings, and actions, it can give you the power to handle the situation. For this reason, it doesn’t hold you back from your goal or make things worse.
However, perception accounts for a lot of our experience. Fundamentally, being able to let go of unhealthy thoughts frees us up to consider other healthier and more factual alternatives. In turn, this leads to an improved experience and less intense uncomfortable emotions.
When you have negative feelings and thoughts about a situation, over time it can start to affect your behaviour toward it. For example, a person who keeps having negative feelings about driving to places they’re not familiar with may start to come up with excuses not to drive.
Over time, these behaviours start to become repeating patterns. Through CBT, you can learn to pay attention to those patterns and actively work to change them, along with the feelings tied to them. Once embedded, it can help to prevent these behaviours from happening in the future.
CBT for anxiety in St Neots helps individuals identify the links in the chain that lead to anxiety and depression. As a treatment, it focuses on the thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and physical sensations that are intimately connected to one another. The key is that you can take action to disrupt the spiral of avoiding the situation that causes anxiety.
For instance, let’s say you’re dealing with low self-esteem. Maybe you try to avoid social situations because being around a lot of people is overwhelming and triggers anxiety.
You’d like to attend a work networking event and you know there will be a big turnout. Your immediate thoughts are, “No way. I’ll have to make small talk. What if people think I’m awkward and have nothing interesting to say?”
Maybe you’re feeling nervous, even slightly panicked. At the last moment, you tell your manager that you’re not feeling well. You won’t be able to make it.
Whilst this behaviour will make you feel better in the short term, it only prolongs the anxiety you feel in networking events. The problem is, when you continuously avoid the situations that trigger anxiety and fear, you continue that negative cycle of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
In therapy, you work on anxiety in networking events. You might:
1. Learn relaxation exercises that you can use when you get another opportunity to attend an event.
2. Write down thoughts you feel when you start to feel anxious.
3. Discuss your weekly thought record.
4. Replace negative thoughts and feelings with ones that are more realistic.
This technique is known as cognitive restructuring or reframing.
As you see yourself increasingly effective at handling the things that previously led to fear and anxiety, you will be more capable of continuing to act in opposition to the fear.
Sessions in CBT for anxiety in St Neots will be around 6-15 sessions. As everyone is different you require more sessions, in which case I will discuss this with you to determine the best way forward. Each session will usually last around 50-60 minutes and will typically be held on a weekly basis.
Generally, you may be set exercises such as thought journaling and different behavioural experiments as well as completing homework. For this reason, CBT takes a proactive approach to therapy and requires commitment from the individual to ‘try out’ different behaviours.
As a result, you will learn strategies that can be used in everyday life to manage your anxiety, even after your treatment has finished
Get in touch for a chat to see how I can help.
Sessions normally take place in St Neots or online.
