Do you feel like you can’t leave the house or be around people? Do you try to avoid eye contact? Do you get nervous about things outside of your control? Do you overthink the choices or things you say? If so, you might struggle with anxiety.
Anxiety can severely limit your ability to live a fulfilling life. Fortunately, there are various treatments for anxiety that can help. Anxiety treatment centers, like Integrative Life Center in Nashville, TN can help you live a more fulfilling life.
Treatment Goals for Anxiety
Seeking treatment for anxiety can be frightening, confusing, or difficult to understand, with many available options. But it doesn’t have to be. While treatment plans can vary, the foundation of anxiety treatment remains constant.
Anxiety treatment goals include:
- Lowering Anxiety Levels. With the right treatment, clients can feel their anxiety levels decrease, and anxieties become less frequent and debilitating.
- Adding Coping Strategies. Clients will experiment with various coping strategies provided by a licensed professional. They will learn which work for them and best support their healing journey.
- Learning Greater Self-Awareness. By reflecting on past experiences and reactions, some people report becoming more self-aware when dealing with anxiety or its after effects.
- Encourages Healthy Habits. Treatment for anxiety can help clients everyday life by helping create and establish healthy habits around diet, sleep, communication, relationships, work, and more. It also helps discourage compulsive behaviors that result from anxiety.
Sheena Miller, Clinical Manager at Integrative Life Center, says that many people with anxiety disorders are on medication to help with symptoms, which is a good starting point for treatment. However, medication doesn’t necessarily allow the person to address the root cause of their anxiety.
As Miller explains, individuals struggling with anxiety should enter into therapy, so they can heal the underlying traumas contributing to their anxiety struggles. Here, they can create therapy goals for anxiety, to help them focus on the progress they make while addressing their underlying traumas.
“The psychological therapy sessions are where a person can begin to find trauma resolution, healing and peace, hopefully, eventually leveling off the need for medication and living a fulfilling life,” says Miller.
Addressing anxiety fully typically means identifying underlying traumas that lead to anxiety (such as this list of adverse childhood experiences that may create anxiety in adulthood). This is often difficult internal work, but the relief it brings over time is priceless.
How is Anxiety Treated?
An open, honest conversation about anxiety with a mental health professional can allow for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Treatment for anxiety depends on many factors, including your symptoms, what’s causing them, how severe they are, and how long you’ve had these feelings.
Anxiety treatment centers like ILC offer holistic treatment to address anxiety properly, including:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). A form of talk therapy that helps people understand negative thought patterns and how they result in specific behaviors. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). A type of talk therapy that helps people with strong emotions understand how their thoughts affect emotions and behaviors.
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). A psychotherapy treatment using lights and specific eye movements to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories.
- Exposure Therapy. A psychological treatment that helps people confront their fears in a safe space.
- Medication. Medication can help control anxiety symptoms. Therapy and medicine can work together quite well for some clients.
“Just as with a physical wound, the first step in healing a wounded soul is to stop the bleeding, basically keeping the situation from worsening,” Miller says. “The focus is on helping the person understand the source of their issue so that we can address it.”
How Long Does it Take for Anxiety Treatment to Work?
The duration of treatment for anxiety can vary. Sadly, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how long it takes to complete treatment, as many factors may affect the process. Simply showing up to an anxiety treatment center is a good start, but one must commit to the prescribed processes to achieve best results and greater peace. A strong and willful mind can help treatment for anxiety by assisting the client in pushing through difficult stages of healing.
Factors that affect anxiety treatment:
- Anxiety Type and Severity. Not everyone has the same anxiety type with equal severity. Some people may experience mild to extreme anxiety that can onset at any time or be trigger-specific.
- The Individual. No two humans are exactly alike. Everyone’s brain is uniquely different, which means everyone’s response process is different as well. Consider the difference between panic attack vs anxiety attack, and how our brains respond in a variety of ways to stress and trauma.
- Underlying Traumas. During therapy sessions, one issue may lead to another deeper issue, causing more anxiety or stress and the need for further treatment. It is best to remain patient and understanding during this process, as it will be better for the long-term goal to uncover and treat these issues that cause anxiety or stress. This is particularly true when it comes to healing childhood trauma, which can lead to amazing freedom and relief
Measuring Your Success in Treatment for Anxiety
While treatment for anxiety may seem daunting, there are ways to monitor your success along the way to help you persevere. These might be tiny nitches to huge milestones, but each is important for overall success and mental well-being.
Ways to monitor success:
- Analyze Progress Toward Goals. Look back to Day 1 and see your steps and how different you feel throughout treatment. Creating three, six, nine, and 12-month treatment plans with your counselor can help you see the progress over an extended period.
- Reflect on Changes in Daily Life. Compare how you approach and handle anxiety and stress now versus before treatment. Look at how it’s helped make tense situations seem more manageable. Reflect on treatment techniques used and how they help benefit your success.
- Evaluate New Coping Skills. Experiment with new coping skills to find new ways to handle and manage anxiety. Examine which coping skills worked better than others, and think about how these new tools help you.
How ILC Can Help
Think about how you landed on this page. Did you search “anxiety treatment near me” and follow the first link? Did a friend or someone in your community or family suggest seeking help? However you found us, now you know that we are here and we are ready to help you heal from the anxiety that you carry. Your healing can begin today, even right now.
Anxiety is often frightening and lonesome, and undergoing anxiety treatment may seem like a big obstacle. Our anxiety treatment centers offer proven programs to make getting help for these feelings and living your best life possible. Contact us at (615) 378-8806 to learn more and start feeling better today.
