Anxiety

Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal reaction to various stress factors in our internal or external environment. This reaction is helpful for any individual to cope with dangerous or demanding situations. However, when this reaction is increasingly heightened and regularly gets out of control, it may develop into an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorder therefore, is a condition that causes the sufferer to experience unease/discomfort at things that usually seem ordinary to other people but can negatively affect an individual’s ability to function normally in everyday situations.

While trying to cope with the effects of anxiety, some people develop a substance use disorder. People with clinical anxiety have a higher chance of suffering from drug and alcohol abuse than the rest of the population.

Self-medicating usually leads to an aggravation of anxiety — drugs and alcohol make anxiety symptoms worse, which leads to an urge to use more substances to feel normal. Eventually, this leads to addiction.

Causes

Although anxiety disorder cannot be traced back to a single cause, several physical and mental conditions can be linked to it. An anxiety disorder could be the result of one or more of the following factors:

  • Environmental Stress.
  • Traumatic life events such as accidents, divorce, death of a loved one, etc.
  • Phobias.
  • Drug or Alcohol Abuse.
  • Financial problems.
  • Relationship issues.
  • Physical conditions such as heart attack or heat stroke.
  • Changes in brain chemicals and its functioning.
  • Family history.

 

Treatment

At Break Free, we acknowledge that therapy helps a client to develop an awareness of what they feel, why they feel that way, what their triggers are, and how they might change reaction to them. Some types of therapy teach practical techniques to reframe negative thinking in the process, change behaviours.

These are some of the therapies that have experientially been effective:

  • Interpersonal Therapy: This therapy focuses on the patient’s disturbed personal relationships that both cause and exacerbate the depression.
  • Cognitive Behavorial Therapy
  1. Helps patients change the negative styles of thinking and behaving that are often associated with depression.
  2. Focuses on recognizing and changing thought patterns and behaviours that lead to troublesome feelings.
  3. Helps limit distorted thinking by looking at worries more realistically.
  • Psychodynamic Therapies
  1. Sometimes used to treat depression.
  2. Focus on resolving the patient’s internal psychological conflicts that are typically thought to be rooted in childhood.
  3. Long-term psychodynamic therapies may be useful if there is a lifelong history and pattern of inadequate ways of coping (maladaptive coping mechanisms) in negative or self-injurious behaviour.
  • Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy involves a controlled environment in which patients are gradually exposed to situations that would normally cause anxiety in them. The purpose is to slowly desensitize them to those triggering situations until those triggers become manageable, or completely eliminated. As a result, the patient has less panic or fewer anxiety attacks over time.