What is your anxiety costing you? Anxiety is one of the main reasons people seek therapy. When they try to use all the anxiety management techniques they know how and nothing seems to work is typically when they walk through my door.

Anxiety is a normal human emotion; we all experience it regularly at a low level. Typically we are not aware of it, or if we are, it doesn’t affect our ability to live life as we choose.

However, some people experience anxiety at such a heightened level that they have panic attacks, or fear that that will have one, so their life becomes very limited. They may not leave their house or travel on the roads and miss out on life events for themselves and loved ones. They think if I just stay home, I’ll be safe and won’t have to deal with anxiety.

The problem with that line of thought is the more you avoid it, the more you have it. It’s like a little baby tiger behind the door. It’s not so scary when it’s little, so you think if I just give it a little meat and close the door, it will leave me alone. The problem is, the more you feed it the bigger it grows, until you have a huge tiger on your hands.

Here’s how to take stock of your anxiety-the costs and benefits of your control techniques. Think of something that you are afraid of. Let’s use fear you have some disease. So you pay attention to all your little aches and pains-a little too much attention, where you think you have a serious health issue. Obviously we want you to get checked out medically to be sure you really are OK before we continue down this road. But after you have had a clean bill of health, you continue to think you have a disease.

So you spend hours on line looking to find your own diagnosis, until you find something. You are actually looking for things to ease your anxiety, but your anxiety management techniques have now raised your anxiety. Or you may find that nothing is really wrong with you, so your anxiety is abated for a day or two. Then some new ache or pain occurs and you go through the same procedure.

So in the short term, your control and management techniques at the most have given you minor relief. No long-term relief. And the cost to you is that you have spent hours on the Internet trying to ease your anxiety, vs. being engaged in your life, doing the things you like or spending time with the people you love.

If this is something you struggle with, give me a call at 713-304-6554, and together we can get your life back on track.

Take care,

Debbie