Anxiety & Stress Counselling
Including:
- Stress
- Anxiety
- Panic Attacks
- Social Phobia
- Specific Phobias
- Obsessions & Compulsions
- 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 both mental and physical health. 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 addictions resulting in further problems.
General Anxiety
Anxiety may build up over many years or occur quite suddenly. The symptoms occur in complex and various ways and are often unrecognised or masked by habitual ways of coping. These may be isolated to particular people, places or occasions or more generalised. Generalised anxiety includes:
- 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 quite specific conditions. While these may sound scary we have increasing understanding of such conditions as normal neurobiological responses to stress and adaptive variations on normal developmental patterns:
- Panic Attacks / Anxiety Attacks (racing heart, sweating, trembling, dizziness etc) - see separate page
- Social Anxiety / Social Phobia (fear of social situations)
- Agoraphobia (fear of public and/or unfamiliar places)
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (persistent symptoms following trauma)
- Phobias (specific fears)
- Obsessions or Compulsions
- 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. Find an Auckland Therapist in your area or learn more about the Services we offer.