Worried all the time? Try to solve problems before they arise? Or try to change things that already have? These are recipes for days of anguish and insomnia. We often learn to try and control things in this way early in our lives and while it's certainly a great skill to be organized, overdoing it can obviously be detrimental to our well-being. Indeed, nothing ever goes as planned (or very rarely!).

 

Trying to avoid the things we fear the most can become an obsession. We spend an enormous amount of time and mental and physical energy trying to avoid these things. Eventually, when they inevitably happen, we don't believe we can handle them, so we tend not to handle them very well. This is due to the physiological changes that affect us as human beings.

 

Basically, when you become stressed, your heart beats faster, leading to many other changes in your body that tell your brain to use a more primitive part in charge of survival. Fight, fly, freeze! being tense and constantly hypervigilant is exhausting and often leads to the development of fatigue and generally unnecessary habits (working too much, drinking too much, eating too much, using anger to get what you have and then feeling guilty & ashamed) .

 

Learning to relax, have fun and enjoy life on its own terms is essential. To help people accomplish this task, I begin by providing education about what happens physiologically when we are under stress. Then I teach some basic grounding and relaxation techniques and teach cognitive-behavioral strategies to help my clients deal with negative thought patterns that contribute to their anxiety levels. Time and time again, I have seen people successfully use these relatively simple strategies through deliberate and dedicated practice, which eventually becomes second nature.