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.

Ask a therapist: To lower anxiety, avoid this at all costs!

Hi, this is Kate with Destiny City Counseling, and just coming to you today with another “Ask a Therapist” question. And today, I just want to address the very common question that I get all the time in therapy, which is people just wanting to know “what can I do to reduce my anxiety?” And so I just wanted to give you a tip on how to lower anxiety. And so this is the number one thing to avoid if you want to lower your anxiety, so that all costs, whatever you do to lower your anxiety: avoid AVOIDING! Avoid “avoidance!”

So avoidance is the fuel for anxiety. Basically, if there's something you're afraid of doing, it's human nature. We don't necessarily want to face that fear. It's not comfortable. And so we'll do whatever we can oftentimes to avoid it. But what we don't realize is that by avoiding something, we are actually empowering that anxiety to grow and to become more powerful in our lives.

And so to give an example, one that I deal with is I don't like going to the dentist. So if I avoid and put off making that appointment for my cleaning, then there's that pressure of, “I know I should make this call. I know I should do it.” But then, I don't want to and I feel fearful, and so if I let myself off the hook and I give myself permission and I say, “well, I'll put it off a couple more weeks, what will that matter?” Immediately, the brain gets a reward. It gets a little hit; the fear of having to face that thing is removed. And so the brain is like, “oh, I feel so much better!” And so what we've just done there is we've reinforced the learning in the brain that says, one, I can't handle that fear and two, avoidance feels good.

And so the brain learns that avoidance feels good and it strengthens that avoidance pathway in the brain. And while that feels good in the short-term, in the long-term, what that does is it actually increases our anxiety because the next time we have to be in that situation where, say now it's two weeks later, and I need to make that call to the dentist, the resistance that I feel to making that call is even more so at this point. The anxiety I feel about doing that thing has been strengthened because I've been actually further entrenching and rewarding that avoidance cycle in my brain. This is how learning gets wired into the brain. The brain gets a hit, a reward anytime we avoid something. And the more you strengthen, they say neurons that fire together, wire together. So when I fire brain cells of avoidance, I'm also lighting up my reward circuits in the brain. And so those two things become very connected.

So in order to break the pattern of avoidance, we have to actually face the thing that we're afraid of. And what we're doing there is we're facing that fear and we are trying to wire our brain with qualities of resilience, of being able to be in uncomfortable situations and to handle it. And that's the neural connections that we want to strengthen. So unfortunately, with anxiety there's no easy way out. Anytime we're dealing with anxiety, almost always the treatment plan is going to have to involve facing that thing that we're afraid of. That's the sucky news about it. But basically, by avoiding avoidance, we will disempower anxiety and start to deconstruct it so it doesn't have a hold on us.

And when we put yourself in an anxious situation, you're putting yourself in a new situation to basically learn that, “oh, you know what? This isn't as bad as I thought. I actually can handle this. I'm actually more resilient than I imagined that I was. I have the ability to handle uncomfortable situations.” And then, more learning occurs in the brain and your brain learns you don’t have to be afraid of thing because you are up to the challenge.

So this is how anxiety is deconstructed over time. So, yeah, there you have it. Avoid avoidance. So next time there's something that you're feeling anxious about, when you feel that temptation to avoid, try to remember that by avoiding, you're feeding a protein shake to that anxiety. You're pumping it up. And instead, you want to let that thing wither and you want to feed your resilience and your ability to tackle that thing. So just do it.

One of my favorite productivity hacks is you guys might've heard a quote by Mark Twain to the effect that if you know on your to do list that day you're going to have to eat a living bullfrog, you're not going to be able to think of anything else until you do it. It's so uncomfortable a task. You might as well get it out of the way first because you're just going to be living in dread oven until you do. So with anxiety, it's kind of that idea of eat the frog, just go for it and get it out of the way, and start strengthening those resilience circuits.

So, I hope that's helpful. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments or message me, and would love to share any helpful tips that I can. And I hope you guys have a great week.

Ask a Therapist: You are not the problem

This is Kate with Destiny City Counseling. And just coming to you for my first “Ask a Therapist” video. So the first question that I wanted to address is just a really common one that I get in counseling all the time. And that's just people coming in wanting to know what can I do to break out of the cycle of anxiety or depression. And so today I just wanted to share one of my favorite mindset shifts that I think can help with not only those issues, but a lot of other things that plague us in mental health and emotional health and stuff like that. And that is just the understanding that you are not the problem, the problem is the problem.

So I think what can often happen when we're dealing with anxiety or depression, especially for a long period of time, is that we can begin to feel like we identify with that thing. "I am depressed, I'm a depressed person, I'm a negative person, I'm an anxious person." And we take on that thing as our identity. And the problem with this kind of thinking is that it fuses us to the problem and it invites shame in and basically we start to see ourselves as the problem. And when you do that, you have boxed yourself out of a lot of the solutions. Because if I'm the problem, then it follows to think that I can only change a certain degree. “Well, I'm just a depressed person. Well, it's just who I am. So I'm always going to struggle with depression. Well, I'm just really anxious. I've always been that way. It's just my personality type.” So you see how that thinking locks you in to whatever the problem is. And you feel a sense of shame about who you are because on an identity level you've agreed with whatever that thing is that you'd like to change.

So alternatively, the way that we can think about it is, I am not the problem, the problem is the problem. Meaning, “I am not a depressed person. I'm a person that struggles with depression. I am not a negative person. I'm a person that has become accustomed to negative mindsets, but I can change that. I am not an anxious person, I'm a person that struggles with anxiety and I'm learning how to overcome it.” So just by changing, it might seem like semantics, changing the language, but language is really powerful. The words that we use in the way... What we think internally, our thoughts, really has an effect on how we see ourself and if we're tapped into a sense of hope. Basically when you're working on changing something, you want to become best friends with hope, and you want to become best friends with empowerment, and you want to tap into mindsets where you believe you can change.

What’s so great, is that in the field of psychology, we’re learing so much about “neuroplasticity,” meaning “neuro”= brain, and “plastic” = moldable, changeable. Psychology just continues to come with more and more research about how we can change the brain, we can change our thoughts. So there's always hope. There's always the ability to change. You are not the problem, the problem is the problem.

You can point your efforts towards what in this equation can I change? What do I have control over? I'm not fusing with whatever that negative thing is. Seeing it as this external thing that you're fighting and you're working to change, but not identifying with it as a sense of self or sense of identity.

Who you are is good and wonderful, and you're learning just to make those changes so that you're not dealing with what you've had to deal with before. So I hope that helps guys. Let me know what other questions you'd like in the comments. Love to answer some in the future.