What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is more than just feeling stressed or worried. Stress and worry are anxious feelings that are a common response to a situation where we feel under pressure, it usually passes once the stressful situation has passed, or ‘stressor’ is removed.
Anxiety is when these anxious feelings don’t subside – when they’re ongoing and exist without any particular reason or cause. It’s a serious condition that makes it hard to cope with daily life. Everyone feels anxious from time to time, but for someone experiencing anxiety, these feelings can’t be easily controlled.
What Causes Anxiety?
While it’s different for everyone, anxiety often develops from a combination of factors rather a single issue or event.
- Family and personal history
- Ongoing stressful events
- Physical health problems
- Substance use
- Personality factors
It’s important to remember that you can’t always identify the cause of anxiety or change difficult circumstances. The most important thing is to recognise the signs and symptoms and seek support.
Signs and Symptoms of Anxiety:
The symptoms of anxiety are sometimes not all that obvious as they often develop gradually, and given we all experience some anxiety at some points in time, it can be hard to know how much is too much.
Some common symptoms include:
- hot and cold flushes
- racing heart
- tightening of the chest
- snowballing worries
- obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviour
Types of Anxiety:
- Generalised Anxiety disorder
- Social phobias
- Specific phobias
- Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
How Gestalt therapy can help with Anxiety
Gestalt therapy is a holistic practice that looks at the whole person and their environment. The aim of the therapeutic relationship in Gestalt therapy is to co-create with the client a new nutritious experience, in order to help the client grow and understand themselves as they are. This involves building awareness and exploring the parts of themselves that they like, the parts that they don’t like and the parts of themselves they have disowned or are out of awareness. It is about accepting all these parts and recognising when they are helpful and unhelpful. When we experience and accept ourselves in our entirety we have flexibility and choice to allow ourselves with awareness to choose in the moment what best serves us.
Often as humans we try to avoid fear, anxiety and panic through trying to control, suppress or avoid these uncomfortable feelings. However these feelings wish to be heard and understood and will continue to be present in our lives until they are heard, understood and given a voice.
Therefore we need to make friends with, become curious about and get to know our fear, anxiety or panic by slowing down, looking inward and being welcoming of our own internal experience, allowing space and time for them to be heard, voiced and cared for. It is about learning to know your emotional world and how to relate to your emotions in a way that soothes them rather than exacerbates.
To change our emotions we need to feel our emotions and respond to them with attention and care.
Emotions are designed to enhance life, not detract from it. Learning to embrace and be with all emotions pleasant and not pleasant is the key to emotional health.
To overcome Anxiety a therapist can walk you through the following steps:
- Valuing emotional experience
- Fear fitness: Welcoming, allowing and staying with your fears
- Learning to read your fears
- Labelling emotions: putting your fears into words
- Accepting your fears
- Using your fears intelligently
- Identifying if your primary emotion is about the past, present or future