Anxiety & Stress Counselling

Including:

• Stress & anxiety
• Social phobia / social anxiety
• Obsessions & compulsions
• Panic attacks / anxiety attacks
• Specific phobias
• Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Agoraphobia

Anxiety  & Stress

While a certain amount of stress in our lives is inevitable, continual high stress levels are bad for health, both mental and physical. Stress is also likely to impact on relationships in the form of irritability, withdrawal or neediness. Unaddressed stress may lead to increasing anxiety problems and even trigger panic attacks or agoraphobia.

Anxiety is often co-present with depression and can be very debilitating and lonely. In order to cope people sometimes turn to alcohol or drugs resulting in further problems.

General Anxiety

Anxiety may build up over many years or occur quite suddenly. The symptoms occur in various ways and are often unrecognised or masked by normal ways of coping. These may be isolated to particular people, places or occasions or more generalised. General anxiety symptoms include:

• Tension, feeling keyed up, stress, worry
• Sleep disturbance
• Sexual problems
• Physical symptoms (muscle tension, headaches, digestive problems etc)
• Frustration, restlessness, anger or irritability
• Difficulty concentrating or mentally blank
• Nightmares, disturbing memories or flashbacks
• Racing mind, scary random thoughts

Specific Anxiety Issues

Anxiety can manifest in many different ways including some specific conditions. While these may sound scary we have increasing understanding that these are responses to stress and variations of normal development:

• Social Phobia / Social Anxiety (fear of social situations)
• Panic Attacks / Anxiety Attacks (racing heart, sweating, trembling, dizziness etc)
• Obsessions or Compulsions
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (persistent symptoms following trauma)
• Agoraphobia (fear of public and/or unfamiliar places)
• Phobias (specific fears such as flying or spiders)
• Dissociative symptoms (such as feeling unreal, mentally blank or emotionally numb)

Anxiety Treatment

Learning new coping strategies and relaxation techniques is a good place to start yet for many this does not go far enough. Therapy can help in many ways including:

• Professional assessment and support
• A reliable and secure place to return to each week
• Somewhere you don't have to pretend
• Explore stress patterns and triggers
• Feeling supported, heard and understood
• Timeout each week to make sense of life
• A place where you will be accepted as yourself
• Develop management skills, tools and techniques
• A place to recover confidence, self belief and trust

Find a Therapist

All of our team are experienced in working with anxiety issues. See a map of Therapist Locations or find Auckland Therapist by suburb or learn more about the Counselling Services we offer.