Treating anxiety, with counselling

Working with one of our Vancouver counsellors to support your anxiety disorder is an opportunity to walk into the world empowered with the tools to face challenges and manage your physical and emotional anxiety. We will help you overcome anxiety through relaxation techniques, deep breathing, mindfulness based stress reduction, emotional regulation, and other practices that provide relief from anxiety to help you on your healing journey.

When you experience anxiety disorder, you are unknowingly establishing automatic patterns that keep 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.

Experiencing anxiety can feel like…

• Your thoughts go to the worst-case-scenario all the time
• 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
• You have distorted thoughts that lead to avoidance and isolation, hindering social connections and increasing shameful feelings
• You don't have full control of emotional balance and experience anxious feelings in everyday life
• You experience racing thoughts that can cause you to feel so overwhelmed that you are unable to be present in the moment
• 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 might experience panic attacks or panic disorder and face challenging negative thoughts without knowing the underlying causes

How anxiety therapy can help

As therapists, it is our job to help you identify, unpack, and break patterns of negative thinking that feed and harbour fear in your body. Through the use of empirically valid, holistic therapeutic techniques like Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, we will teach you how to reduce stress and anxiety symptoms and manage anxiety in real-time, helping you to remain present.

This will ultimately allow you to worry less, gain more confidence, strengthen your relationships, increase your productivity, and find more fulfilment and joy in your life.

Anxiety can be difficult to talk about and exhausting to live with

At Sana, our registered clinical counsellors understand mental health challenges personally, which enables us to provide compassionate support and a deeply empathetic approach to our practice. Our team members can support treating anxiety disorders with EMDR, Somatic therapy, CBT, and the humanistic approach we tailor each session to your unique needs.