Anxiety can be very disabling, that is, can provoke such an intense emotion of fear in us that we begin to avoid essential situations to live normally (going out, taking public transport or driving, interacting with anyone…).
Therefore, it is very important that you seek professional help before anxiety limits your life and worsens your problem. If this is already the case, you’re in luck: there is still a solution. Psychologists are health professionals trained to help you take back control of your life and take control of anxiety.
And you can think: “And how is it going to help me if I have already tried everything?”. Keep reading the article and we will see how a psychologist can help you overcome anxiety, whatever your case may be.
Anxiety is defined as an emotion, specifically, a fear that anticipates a feared future situation. This emotion creates a state of hypervigilance and motor agitation in our body, which can cause different physiological symptoms, such as pain or pressure in the chest, sweating, tingling or tremors.
Despite being an unpleasant emotion, it has an adaptive function, that is, allows us to adapt to the dangerous situation. The very symptoms that we notice in the body help us detect that something bad is going to happen and prepares us to act quickly. Thus, it drives us to avoid or resolve the dangerous situation.
In the past, these dangers were related to survival, but today these dangerous situations can be, for example, having to speak in public, take an exam, meeting your in-laws… Come on, we already consider cultural situations as dangerous. This does not mean that anxiety loses its usefulness, it continues to help us cope with them.
The problem comes when anxiety lasts for a long time or interferes with your daily life, causing you to lose control. Keeping the body agitated and hyper-alert for a long time is very tiring, and feeling afraid for so long undermines our mental health. It is also a problem that anxiety appears at exaggeratedly high levels, so much so that instead of helping us face the situation, it prevents us from doing so and we have to avoid it because we do not feel prepared.
Both cases can produce a lot of despair and frustration, because anxiety begins to determine what you can do and what you cannot do, and you feel like you are losing control of your life. It is difficult to overcome anxiety without help, and your environment may not even know how to help you and you may need a health professional. Therefore, in these cases, we recommend that you seek help from a psychologist to overcome anxiety.
How can a psychologist help you with anxiety?
Anxiety is a complex experience, as are anxiety disorders. Your problem may be a collection of tangled situations and factors that are difficult to unravel on your own. However, Psychologists are specialists in unraveling this mess. After doing an evaluation, the psychotherapist will give you an explanation of the problem, describing its causes and what maintains it today.
Once you know this, it is much easier to find a solution to the problem. From there, he or she will design a personalized treatment so that you can overcome anxiety step by step. Treatment is really about teaching you effective skills to overcome anxiety. These skills may be completely new to you, or they may be ones you already have and your therapist brings out. Sometimes we don’t realize that the solution is within our reach.
Why is it important that the treatment be personalized? Because each person is unique, and not everyone has the same coping skills or is able to learn them. In the same way, your anxiety problem is also unique as it is a set of very specific situations and factors, although it shares characteristics with other anxiety problems.
Thus, the professional who helps you overcome anxiety will design the treatment to fit your problem 100%, looking for how to resolve the different situations in which your anxiety occurs and how to eliminate the cause and maintainers.
Last but not least, The therapist will show you the empathy and support necessary to make you feel better. They are professionals who know well how hard it is to feel anxiety and have it limit your life, which is why they will know how to listen to you and help you perfectly, making therapy a safe place in which to express yourself and feel understood.
How to find a psychologist for my case?
Anxiety is such a common problem that, in fact, basic training in psychology is about anxiety problems. This means that any psychologist licensed to practice in your country must be able to treat an anxiety problem.
Otherwise and infrequently, when making the appointment, you can briefly explain that your problem is related to anxiety. If the psychologist did not see himself capable of solving your problem, he would explain it to you and would not agree to treat your case.
Fortunately, the role of the expert anxiety psychologist is very consolidated, because These types of alterations are among the most common and some of us psychotherapists specialize in them.
There are also many specific trainings on anxiety, so you can surely find someone even more specialized to treat your problem if you consider it necessary. When looking for psychologists, you can look at their training profiles on their websites to find this specific information.
Assuming then that it is easy to find psychologists trained to treat anxiety, the ideal is that you have one with whom you have feeling.
It is key that you feel comfortable in the session. After all, you need to trust this person to tell them about topics that may seem intimate to you, and to test the solutions that I propose. Keep in mind that psychologists are professionals used to treating these problems, we are used to listening and giving solutions without prejudging, so we will know how to understand and help you.
It may happen to you that you notice that you do not get along with your psychologist, just as it can happen to us in all the places where we are treated by other people (doctor, restaurants, hairdressers…). If this happens, don’t throw in the towel. Try giving him a little room to see if the therapeutic alliance emerges.
In any case, regardless of the psychologist who handles your case, remember that Anxiety problems can be effectively addressed through psychotherapy: You don’t have to resign yourself to suffering them forever.
