therapy for anxiety and depression

6 Common Sources of Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and depression are among the most common reasons people seek therapy.  Often these two conditions will occur together. They might be due to one of the following root causes, or perhaps in your case it is a combination:

 

1. A challenging situation or tragic event that has occurred in life, such as a relationship breakup, job loss or death of a loved one

2. Adjusting to new circumstances, even positive life events such as moving to a new town, starting school or a new job, getting married or having a baby

3. A physical condition such as medical illness, side effects of medication or postpartum depression

4. A history of trauma or abuse

5. Drug or alcohol abuse or addiction

6. Low self-esteem

Therapy for Panic Attacks

If you’ve had a panic attack, you know how distressing and frightening they can be. Although they’re not dangerous, the intensity of panic symptoms might lead you to believe you are having a medical emergency such as a heart attack. You can experience a range of symptoms that include:

 

  • A skipping or racing heart
  • Sweating and shaking
  • Shortness of breath
  • Choking sensations
  • Chest pain or pressure
  • Nausea or diarrhea
  • Dizziness, lightheadedness, feeling faint
  • Tingling or numbness in parts of your body
  • Hot flushes or chills
  • Feeling things around you are strange, unreal, detached, unfamiliar, or feeling detached from body
  • Worry that you’re going to lose control
  • Fear that you’re dying
The reasons these symptoms occur is that your mind perceives current stressful situations or events in your life as overwhelming and threatening. (You may not even know how much these situations are affecting you.) 

When you feel this threat, the primitive part of your brain is triggered to go into a survival mode to protect you from danger. The symptoms you experience are caused by the body getting prepared for fight or flight, as if you are in physical danger.

How Therapy Can Help

Panic Attacks: There are many helpful therapeutic tools and concepts to reduce and eliminate panic attacks. Therapy can give you ways to immediately manage these attacks. It will also help you get to the root of the anxiety that is causing them, so they are less likely to happen again. 

 

General Anxiety and Depression: The use of medication alone may provide enough relief if your condition is caused solely by a medical issue, but in most situations anxiety and depression also have a psychological component. 

 

While medications can help with symptoms, they do not address the core issues causing your anxiety or depression, so they cannot provide the same kind of relief. Therapy goes much deeper than just alleviating symptoms; it also provides you with an opportunity to make more permanent and rewarding changes in your life. These include:

  • Gaining an understanding of how you view yourself, others and the world from a particular perspective
  • Developing healthy coping strategies for managing intense emotions
  • Identifying habitual, destructive patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving
  • Changing unhealthy patters of self-talk and underlying negative beliefs
  • Processing and healing from traumatic events and grief
  • Clarifying your vision and values for living
  • Increasing feelings of self-worth and finding deeper significance to life
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