Counselling for Anxiety

Our counsellors are here to help you live an empowered life, free of anxiety.

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health hurdles that Canadians face. It can range anywhere from mild to severe and everyone experiences it differently. Attending counselling for anxiety can help you manage or overcome your fear and worry, and change negative thinking patterns and all-consuming thoughts. Anxiety counselling can also help your body learn to access more safety, allowing for a healthy nervous system.

How can working with a therapist help your anxiety?

The goal is to have you walking away from every session empowered to face challenges by providing you with the tools to manage your somatic and cognitive anxiety. Counselling will provide you with the skills to understand why you feel anxious. You will also learn better coping methods and problem-solving skills that help you regulate your anxiety outside of therapy. Additionally, your sessions can bring to light the underlying causes of your anxiety. These issues can be targeted and resolved. The use of empirically valid, holistic therapeutic techniques will teach you how to reduce stress, and ultimately be present. Often, anxious thoughts are so automatic that they are difficult to notice. It is my work to help you identify, unpack, and break patterns of negative thinking that feed and harbour fear in your body. This will ultimately allow you to worry less, gain more confidence, strengthen your relationships, increase your productivity, and overall find more fulfilment and joy in your life.

• Openly voice your concerns in a safe and secure environment

• Identify your negative thoughts and behaviours and how they affect your anxiety

• Challenge your anxious thoughts and replace them with more productive thoughts and behaviours

• Understand your own patterns and recognize problematic areas and maladaptive core beliefs that are no longer useful to you

• Assist you in regaining power over your anxiety, about yourself and the world around you

• Recognize your anxiety in your body before you begin the mental and emotional spiral

You can learn to reduce or eliminate your anxiety and together, we can work towards reducing stress and improving the quality of your life. Feel free to get in touch for a complimentary phone consultation.

We all want to live healthy, happy lives free of stress and worry, but when constant worrying is getting in the way of enjoying life or completing everyday tasks, you are suffering more than necessary. Anxiety occurs when your stress response is experiencing false alarms. This is triggered by a combination of unproductive, repetitive thoughts, emotional overwhelm, and activation in your nervous system. When anxiety is experienced, you are unknowingly establishing automatic patterns that are keeping you stuck in the same stressful anxiety cycle(s). This creates tension in your body and fatigue in your mind. These triggers are helpful when we are in danger but when these worries are irrational or out of proportion to reality it makes it exhausting to finish everyday tasks and maintain healthy relationships. Considering therapy is a reasonable solution to help you sort through your unproductive stress responses.

• Your thoughts go to the worst-case-scenario all the time, which makes you feel fearful of certain situations

• You worry about what you “should be” doing at this stage of your life, and think negatively about yourself, rather than enjoying the present

• You compare yourself to others and experience negative thoughts about how others perceive you.

• Distorted thoughts lead to avoidance and isolating yourself, hindering social connections and increasing shameful feelings

• You experience racing thoughts that can cause you to feel so overwhelmed that you are unable to be present in the moment, even when you’re trying to relax

• You have a consistent need to distract yourself to avoid feeling and thinking

• You experience physical symptoms in your body, like digestive issues and muscle tension

• You feel fatigued or irritable

• Your anxiety feels out of control

• You have difficulty concentrating or sleeping

• You experience strong fear that causes chest pains, dizziness, shaking sweating, shortness of breath, or intense fear of dying

• You avoid places or social situations out of fear

Anxiety can be difficult to talk about and exhausting to live with. Get in touch for more information on how you can work through this and what it’s like to work with a Vancouver anxiety specialist. Click to book a session today.