How Therapy Can Reduce Anxiety: The Anxiety Equation

In the next few blogs, I will be writing a series of tips for how to reduce anxiety. As an anxiety therapist in Tacoma, WA, most clients that I work with suffer from an anxiety disorder of one kind or another.

anxiety disorders are on the rise.

During the height of the pandemic in 2020-2021, we saw an increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression from 36.4% to 41.5% (CDC). Even as the worst effects of the pandemic have waned, we have more global instability, financial pressures, and personal stressors than many of us have experienced before in our lifetime.

Now just because you have anxious feelings does not mean you have an anxiety disorder. Generally, something is considered an anxiety disorder if the symptoms you are having inhibit your functioning and cause persistent distress. There are several types of anxiety disorders including PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, burnout from work, caregiving, etc., obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, and more. A therapist can explore your symptoms with you and work with you to understand if you meet the criteria for a diagnosis.

How therapy for anxiety has helped me.

As an anxiety therapist in Tacoma, WA, I am not immune to anxiety. I know firsthand the suffering that anxiety can cause. So I too have to stay vigilant of my own mental health and find strategies to reduce and manage anxiety in my life (which I do through working with my own therapist and practicing many of the techniques I share with clients). Today I want to share an “equation” of sorts that I personally have found immensely helpful in my own recovery from anxiety, and many of my clients have benefited from understanding this principle, too.

An anxiety disorder = OVERESTIMATING a sense of risk + UNDERESTIMATING your own ability to cope.

Is your mind-blown? 🤯 Not yet? Let’s break it down a little further.

Anxiety causes us to overestimate the risk of many situations.

One symptom of anxiety is hyper-vigilance. That means we constantly scanning our circumstances, environment, relationships, etc. for danger. This is actually a wonderful survival skill. We need to be aware to stay safe. But when we move from “normal” anxiety to “disordered anxiety,” it’s like these survival skills like hyper-vigilance get stuck in the on-switch. The brain and body don’t know how to relax and go back into our baseline of safety.

You’ve probably noticed that the more hyper-vigilant you are looking for a threat, the more you will find evidence of one. Have you ever thought you heard a sound in the house at night and your brain instantly goes toward a break-in? Those next moments in bed you are still as a statue and hyper-aware of every little creak of the house and gust of wind, and your brain can run away with this and create all sorts of scary scenarios.

Or maybe you get anxious about the feelings of anxiety itself in the body. This is common for people with panic disorder. We become afraid of feeling afraid. This can cause us to be hyper-vigilant about every little change in our bodies. We become concerned about any increase in heart or change in breathing. And if you are anxious about your heart rate and then start monitoring your heart rate, guess what—your heart rate is going to increase, and then the anxiety increases, and so the cycle goes.

These are examples of normal, everyday occurrences that our anxious brains can twist into things that feel really scary. In these examples, we are overestimating the risk of various scenarios.

anxiety causes us to underestimate our ability to cope.

The other piece of this equation is that when we have an anxiety disorder, we are prone to drastically underestimating our ability to cope in the situations we fear. Worry and overthinking really come into play here. Our brain shows us a horror movie marathon we never bought tickets for—images of ourselves devastated by an illness, ruined by financial loss, the butt of that joke whispered at the party, etc.

The brain is all too good at inventing scary stories. Weirdly, this is also rooted in survival. Your brain is always all about your survival as its number one priority, and it doesn’t know when it’s WAY TOO OVER-EAGER at its job! If your brain and body are dealing with disordered anxiety, it will want to influence your behavior to not do anything that is risky. And part of that is us imagining that these various scenarios will be too much for us to handle.

Something else that reinforces our false beliefs that we cannot cope well with the things we fear is something else that is a key player in every anxiety disorder: AVOIDANCE.

Avoidance will super-charge your anxiety.

It’s natural, you were bit by a dog as a kid, and subsequently, you are afraid of dogs, so you avoid dogs! But anxiety disorders tend to take on a life of their own. At first, you avoided owning a dog, but that fear can grow to never petting dogs, refusing to enter a house if there’s a dog there, breaking out into sweats when walking around your neighborhood for fear of running into a dog, etc. Every time we avoid the thing we are afraid of, avoidance is like a little reward to our brain. I don’t have to face that thing—a get out of jail free card, yay! But the more we do that, the more reinforce avoiding our fears, and teach our brain we are incapable of handling our fears! And so that fear grows.

This is how social anxiety blooms into more and more fear of meeting new people or going into public spaces. Or how agoraphobia (the fear of leaving one’s house or safe zone or familiar surroundings) starts to develop. We are less and less willing to tolerate risk because the brain has been rewarded time and time again by little avoidance treats that cut short our discomfort with facing our fears, even if it’s safe and necessary to do so.

So what’s the answer?

Reducing anxiety involves more accurately assessing risk and growing in confidence in our ability to tolerate discomfort.

The good news is there are many effective treatments for anxiety! Hurrah! We must learn to correct our exaggerated perceptions of risk by becoming aware of the thoughts we are having that scare us, deconstructing them, and replacing them with more accurate thoughts that are much more realistic about the danger. We must also learn to slowly start facing our fears in a safe environment so we can grow in confidence that we are capable of handling that discomfort. Through this process, we learn we are actually much more capable and resilient than we thought.

Another approach that is necessary is working with our bodies. Anxiety is not all in our heads. While addressing thinking is important, we also need a body-based approach. Most of the symptoms that give us discomfort are in our bodies—racing heart, upset digestion, sleeplessness, fatigue, etc.

This is why I love using the therapy brainspotting to help people who suffer from anxiety. It is a gentle body-based approach that heals without retraumatizing. Our goal here is to help your fight-flight-freeze system in your brain go back to its baseline and off of high alert. We are helping your nervous system to relax, which will also make it easier for you to change your thinking patterns to reduce anxiety as well.

I am an anxiety therapist in Tacoma, Wa and WA state.

Don’t suffer alone anymore! Finding an anxiety therapist in Tacoma, WA can help you to reduce anxiety, manage stress, and find peace again. Anxiety disorders are very treatable. Call today for a free 15-minute phone consultation to see if we are a good fit.