Understanding Anxiety: When Worry Becomes Overwhelming
Understand anxiety, explore what may lie beneath persistent worry and discover how psychotherapy can help you develop a different relationship with anxious feelings.
Anxiety in relationships
Anxiety is a common emotion amongst humans, because at its core, its function is to detect threats and danger and therefore protect us. Anxiety keeps us alert. There is a very natural level of anxiety that we need - to be cautious. But then there is another level of anxiety that can debilitate us, as it becomes a disproportionate response to our environment and reality.
In a relationship, anxiety can manifest in a way that challenges the dynamics between two people, leading to many things such as communication breakdown, distance/withdrawal, sexual difficulties and more.
Nervous System healing: Polyvagal Therapy
Polyvagal theory helps people understand and work with their nervous system’s responses to stress, trauma, and connection — especially the way we shift between states of safety, shutdown, or hyperarousal. Polyvagal-informed therapy can also help you track and regulate your nervous system.
This insight can reduce shame and increase self-compassion. You learn to recognize when you're shifting into fight/flight or shutdown, and practice tools to move back into a regulated state. These can include breathwork to calm sympathetic arousal, movement or touch to emerge from dorsal shutdown, voice tone, music, or eye contact to activate safety cues
Anxiety attack - what to do?
What is an anxiety attack? You have an anxiety attack when you experience a fear or worry that comes very intensely. An anxiety attack is often building up before you experience it as an attack. People also interchangeably use panic attacks and anxiety attacks. The main difference is that certain stressors can trigger the anxiety attack, whilst a panic attack is typically sudden and unexpected. Anxiety attacks are often less intense and last longer than a panic attack.