So, you're officially diagnosed with Anxiety.
Being the most common mental health disorder in the United States, you are definitely not alone. With this new discovery, the tension and stress that lives inside of your every-day activities is now elevated - you're feeling anxious about figuring out how to treat the anxiousness! Your therapist will always help you follow the right route to treatment, but sometimes it's hard to agree to something without understanding the options first. When you can see everything laid out and understand what to expect, it can make the therapy journey a lot less stress-inducing.
There are six common types of therapy utilized to address Anxiety - the most common of which is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Depending on the type of anxiety that you are suffering as well as the severity of your symptoms, your therapist may utilize other therapy practices, such as exposure therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectal behavioral therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), or interpersonal therapy (IPT).
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is the most common type of therapy for treating any version of an anxiety disorder. This is due to the fact that CBT therapy revolves around the ideology that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all linked - and that a change in one, will reflect a change in the others. CBT therapy teaches patients the skills needed to interrupt and change negative thoughts or behavioral patterns that promote their mental health problems. If you can adjust the way that you think when you start to feel overwhelmingly anxious, you can help your body and brain calm back down.
Exposure Therapy
Exposure Therapy is a form of CBT that is specifically directed towards overcoming fears. Your therapist works closely with you to provide short term exposures to the object triggering your fears, to slowly build up a tolerance in your day to day life. It teaches coping skills and introduces new thought patterns into your brain, by forcing it to learn how to overcome the triggering responses brought on by your fears. Exposure therapy can be done via images (looking at photos of your fears), real-life encounters, and VR encounters.
