Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress or danger. It can include muscle tension, shortness of breath, worry and negative thinking about the future.
Everyone on the planet will experience anxiety from time to time. But sometimes anxiety can appear too often or can become too intense so that it gets in the way of your day-to-day life. This can happen over time or can be as a result of a specific situation.
For some people, this takes the form of obsessive thinking or worry. For some, it becomes fear. Of what might happen, or of specific situations or objects such as flying or needles. For others it is more purely physical and with no obvious trigger. It can affect the breathing, at times so much that it becomes a panic attack, which is when fear becomes sudden and overwhelming, sometimes resulting in a feeling that you are about to die.
When anxiety takes over it can stop us from doing things that bring us a life of vitality, purpose and meaning. It can become very debilitating.
The good news is that anxiety is extremely treatable with psychotherapy. Through therapy you will learn to completely change your relationship to your anxiety so you can get back into the driving seat of your life.
Treatment is typically between around 8 and 15 sessions and people often enjoy long lasting results.
Why we have anxiety
Anxiety evolved to quickly get us to react to danger when we were living as cave people. For example, if we encountered an angry animal, we would become fearful. The experience of fear sharpens our senses, quickens our thinking, activates our muscles and quickens our heart rate so we can get away. Therefore, we don’t have to consciously get ourselves to notice the danger of the animal. We are instantly prepared to deal with it. People who were able to do this better were more likely to survive and reproduce. Nowadays, most of us don’t live in constant fear of being eaten, but our brains can’t tell the difference between a real tiger and a potential threat such as losing a job so we have the same response.