We all get anxious and stressed occasionally. It’s normal. Everyday stresses can actually help us when we need to focus our efforts, or when life requires us to “up out game”. After all, you wouldn’t want your surgeon’s concentration to wander mid-operation, nor would it be very sensible for you to take a casual attitude if someone is waving a gun around. So, when increased anxiety helps you to concentrate better or to up your performance levels, then that type of stress is a good thing.

Of course, when your anxieties and stresses get too intense, when they go on for too long, when you find yourself getting overly anxious or irrationally worried without any obvious cause, when anxiety disrupts your life, then that’s unhealthy. You need help!

Put simply, anxiety and stress become harmful when they start to overwhelm your ability to manage your life or even to function at all. If stress gets too much to bear, then you can all too easily lose your ability to get by, and it gets harder to cope with your world. You need help!

The symptoms of anxiety can appear in the mind, (worry, fear, dread, irritability, panic, etc.), and in the body, (palpitations, fast pulse, rapid breathing, dizziness, sweating, upset tummy, and so on). If you are regularly experiencing any of these symptoms, it’s best first to see your GP. That’s because sometimes what seem to be anxiety symptoms might actually be the result of a physical illness. However, if your doctor tells you that you are physically OK, then it is very likely that your symptoms are due anxiety or stress. There’s no need to put up with anxiety or stress. You don’t need to suffer alone. Trying to tough it through on your own won’t get you anywhere. Get help – the psychological treatments work!

Dealing with anxiety or stress is a complex business. That’s why I first properly assess your problem to find out how exactly anxiety and stress affect you, and what the causes are likely to be. In that way we can decide together what sorts of treatments are needed. Get that wrong and we could end up making things worse. Sometimes, just showing you how to control, or even perhaps to eliminate your symptoms, can be the best approach. At other times, a more analytic approach is required. That’s because we might need to look at the psychological origins of your problems. Very often it’s both approaches together. In addition, for some people, a rebalancing of life’ priorities is the way to go. That’s when people will need a lot of help and support while they check out what sorts of changes in their lifestyles are helpful and which are not.

My job is to help you understand what may be causing your anxiety, talk through the problems you are facing, and to find ways forward. The help I offer will depend on you, your situation, and how anxiety and stress is affecting your life. Of course, asking for help can be hard but doing so is the first step on the road to recovery

It’s important to keep in mind that anxiety and stress are normal reactions to troubling life events. If something is going on in your life that is very worrying, even threatening, then it’s happening. It’s real. You can’t just ignore it. You have to deal with it. That’s when any of us can get tensed up. Fortunately, for most of us, most of the time, we eventually calm down again. The difficulty for people suffering from clinical levels of excess anxiety is that they can never fully calm down. That’s because they are partly wound-up all the time. They don’t realise this of course, because being hyper has become part of their normality. They have got so used to being anxious all the time that they just don’t notice it anymore. This means that when they hit a stressful situation, their reaction is much more severe than other people’s. They don’t go from 0 to 5; they start from 5 and rapidly go to 10. Therefore, clearly it would help anxiety suffers if they could find out how to significantly lower their background levels of anxiety. It would also help them if they could learn how to lessen their reactions to any particular stressful situation. In other words, a vital step on the road to recovery is to find out about self-management and regaining control. I will show you how to do this. Learning how to relax is an important part of any anxiety and stress treatment package. An equally vital step is to find out how anxiety and stress became such a big problem for you. That’s something that we can work on together.

All this means that the best treatments for anxiety include guided self-treatment as well as “talking therapy” but don’t worry – you don’t have to do it all by yourself. So, if you decide to come and see me, what can you expect? I usually tackle anxiety in two ways. A sort of “double whammy”. Firstly, I will show you how to manage your anxiety and how to regain control of your life. Secondly, I will help you find out why and when your anxiety started and explore ways of dealing with the root causes.

The sorts of anxiety treatments I offer include:

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – helps eliminate/reduce symptoms
• Counselling and psychotherapy – helps find the root causes
• Psychological therapy – helps you to cope
• Self-help training – learn how to manage by yourself

It’s my job to help you find out what sort of treatment package is right for you.

Get Help With Anxiety and Stress

You don’t need to put up with anxiety or stress or suffer alone. If anxiety or stress is affecting your life, contact me to discuss how I can help.