Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash A 25-year-old graduate student, I’ll call Alara, sought therapy with me for severe panic and anxiety symptoms. She often awakened in terror. With a racing heart…
Category: Anxiety
A Tool to Help You Manage Your Anxiety in the New Year
With the start of a new year, we think about goals we can set and hope to achieve. It’s worth highlighting the intention of actionable and practical skills for helping the management…
Thinking of Cancelling Due to Social Anxiety?
Source: fotostorm / iStock It’s the afternoon of that party you RSVP’d “yes” to two weeks ago. Dread has been slowly building for the last few days. As the minutes tick by,…
Are You Keeping Up With Those New Year’s Resolutions?
Source: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels My previous post talked about how difficult it can be to actualize our New Year’s resolutions. From the Deconstructing Anxiety perspective, the reason is that our strategy is faulty—when…
5 Tips for Applying the Rule of Opposites
marta-nogueira/Pexels If at first you don’t succeed, as the familiar expression goes — well, you know the rest. But if “try, try again” doesn’t get you better results, it may be time…
The Problem With Control |
Control, or rather, seeking to have control, is a form of anxiety. It is rooted in the default, and often unconscious belief or feeling that “I am not going to be okay”…
5 Faces of Anxiety That You May Not Recognize
Source: TheDigitalArtist/pixabay When we think of anxiety, we usually think of constant worrying, imagining worst-case scenarios about the future, or panic attacks that come out of seemingly nowhere but leave you feeling…
What’s Really Happening During a Panic Attack
Source: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona / Unsplash Panic attacks are scary. They can make us feel that we are losing control of ourselves, that we are in imminent danger, or that we are…
The Intergenerational Wisdom of Anxiety
The COVID-19 pandemic punted many of us into a foreign world where our past adaptations failed. Suddenly, even grocery shopping felt like a high-speed game of Pac-Man, as we outran masked ghosts…
We’ve Evolved to Survive, and to Feel Miserable
People come to see me for help with their depression, anxiety, eating disorder, addiction, or any other label that fails to adequately describe why we hurt. These diagnoses take on a life…