How Anxiety Counseling Can Help & Where To Find It

If you’re searching for anxiety counseling, you’re not alone.

Statistically, anxiety is the most common disorder plaguing people across the United States.

In this article, I’ll share a story about a client who, like many people, had anxiety. The anxiety affected her relationships, work, and sleep, making it hard for her to function in the world.

A Story About A Client With Anxiety

Sofia’s anxiety had gotten so bad it was impacting her relationship with David. 

On our first call, she said she didn’t know if the anxiety would ever go away – but she had to try something. She didn’t want to keep feeling plagued by her anxiety. 

Her anxiety made it hard for her to connect with others, be in public, and do her work comfortably. Most importantly, it was starting to affect her relationship with her boyfriend. 

Things seemed to be getting worse and worse. 

Some nights she lay in bed, unable to feel David’s presence and love. Instead, she just felt anxious and struggled to fall asleep. And there were days when she struggled in social situations and felt a type of anxiety that crippled her ability to enjoy being with people.

She even admitted that her anxiety was so severe on one occasion that she called into work and said she was sick so that she wouldn’t feel anxiety. 

It was clear she was suffering, and I knew that my anxiety counseling methods could help her. 

Many People Have Anxiety

Having gone through my journey with social anxiety and finding an answer – I know what Sofia felt very well. 

My anxiety was so debilitating at one point that I avoided social situations and couldn’t ask women on dates (I didn’t date until I was 24 years old). My self-esteem suffered because of my anxiety. So for years, I did whatever I could to ensure I didn’t feel it, which meant avoiding many things I wanted. 

Interestingly, according to leading research, anxiety disorders are the most common and treatable.

What I’ve found, and what experts have found, anxiety is made worse by ignoring it and stuffing it down. Finding some anxiety counseling is usually the best option, but most people avoid getting help and don’t get help. 

After decades of feeling my anxieties around relationships, being in groups, speaking in public, being close to others, and being in social situations, I couldn’t take it any longer. Like Sofia, my anxiety was so crippling that I knew I had to get help at some point. 

I sought out various experts to help me with anxiety counseling to get over it. I worked with NLP experts, hypnotists, therapists, shamans, and just about anyone who promised that they could help me feel more calm, confident, and relaxed. 

With all my work to resolve my anxiety, I knew my anxiety counseling experiences and methods could help Sofia. 

What Happens In Anxiety Counseling Sessions

First, you’ll talk about the issue.

In our first online counseling session, Sofia described how anxiety affected her mental health. She told me how sometimes she didn’t want to be touched, couldn’t feel present, and would struggle to feel calm, even if she was with David and things were going well. 

She also noticed that sometimes she’d make a big problem out of small things. In addition, her anxiety made her more easily agitated and made it hard to relax or handle issues without having her nerves hijacked. 

Much like people who have anger issues, she experienced the sensation of things going red, and she’d be unable to control the anxiety. 

Next, you’ll start to get input from your counselor to gain insight.

In that first call, Sofia started to see that she didn’t have to live with so much anxiety or guilt about her anxiety. 

This alone was a big step. 

One of the first things she learned in our call was to view her anxiety as something that didn’t have to control her. As a result, she began to empathize with herself and see that she could have more ownership of how she felt. 

This may not sound big to some, but often people with anxiety feel overwhelmed by the feeling and anxiousness. Knowing it doesn’t have to be this way can open up new pathways to feeling something different. 

Instead of feeling anxious, Sofia shared in our anxiety counseling sessions she wanted to learn

• How to be more comfortable around people
• How to be calm even when her partner was sad, upset, or angry with her 
• And how to have a different voice in her head (one that made her feel good about herself)
• How to love herself and set boundaries that made her safe with others 
• How to respond to her partner’s and co-worker’s requests without feeling terrible about herself
• Finally, how to worry less and be happier

Speaking these goals made Sofia feel great. 

Just talking about her goals and fears made her loosen up. For so long, she had lived with the anxiety that she had become afraid even to consider that something different could happen to her life. 

Techniques Anxiety Counselors Use To Treat The Issue

Mindfulness Techniques For Anxiety

A lot of anxiety is because you’re thinking about an issue. An obsessive compulsion that drives you away from being present. Projecting ideas of what has happened, what did happen, or what will happen. All of that takes you away from being here now.

A fantastic book on mindfulness is this one by one of my favorite authors, Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace In Every Step.

A simple mindfulness practice you can adopt is to try going on a walk and pay attention to each step, to your breath, to the sounds, and to observe and be present with what is in each step. As you do this, your mind may wander, but bring it back to the steps, the breath, and the sounds.

A simple exercise like the one above can do wonders to bring you peace.

Breathing Techniques To Calm Your Anxiety

Learning to use your breath in simple ways can go a long way. However, when we’re focused on breathing, it’s hard to project ourselves outside the moment.

A fantastic book to help you with breathing to calm your anxiety is this one, Wherever You Go, There You Are.

A simple breathing exercise you can do is to breathe in and count to ten, then breathe out and count to ten. Doing this for a minute or a few minutes can do wonders to bring you into the moment (and away from your anxiety).

Anxiety Counseling Works To Create A New Mindset

Many of our anxieties are grounded in thinking about our fears, our false beliefs, and negative ideas of ourselves.

Once, I was working with a very talented writer. He was incredibly anxious about his work. He worried that people didn’t like it, that they didn’t like him, and it impaired his ability to work and provide the excellence he wanted to deliver.

In our sessions, we worked on eliminating those anxiety-laden beliefs he had. After just three sessions, he stopped feeling afraid, raised his prices, and changed his relationship with his partner. Once those negative self-beliefs dissipated, his anxieties quieted down. Here’s a post of him sharing that story on his private Facebook page.

As you’ll notice in that post, I used non-traditional methods to shake the client out of his limiting beliefs. A good counselor should use whatever works best for you to help eliminate those negative beliefs that keep you afraid.

Therapeutic Methods Anxiety Counselors Will Use

Anxiety counseling will involve a variety of methods. Sometimes even prescriptions are used.

Some of the healing methods that an anxiety counselor will use are:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming
• Hypnosis
• Rapid Eye Movement Therapy

And a variety of new-age or other lesser-known methods that a counselor knows will work specifically for you.

Anxiety Counseling Helped Sofia Set Healthy Boundaries 

After several more sessions, Sofia started to see patterns. 

One of them was eye-opening. 

Her anxiety wasn’t just something that happened without a cause. One of her triggers was having people walk all over her and not respecting her boundaries. 

Before seeing this, she gave to family members, bosses, friends, and her partner at the cost of her happiness. Trying to meet the needs of everyone made her anxious. Trying to be perfect for so many people stretched her thin and made her not value her boundaries. 

In our sessions, she discovered new ways to say “No.” In addition, she made new distinctions about when she wanted to say yes and no.

Finding her voice and setting boundaries made her feel happier and more energetic, and surprisingly enough, she felt less anxious. And she even found that learning to be okay with saying ‘no’ to others helped her sleep more easily. 

Anxiety Counseling Helped Sofia Stop Losing Herself 

One of the other insights that immensely helped Sofia was learning how to empathize without feeling like she had to change other people’s emotions. 

For most of her life, she had tried caring for people. In doing that, she often found herself physically and emotionally caretaking. 

Letting other people’s emotions impact her so heavily often made her stressed. 

Not only did she find she often gets entangled with others, but she also lost sight of her emotional needs. 

If you want to know what I did to help Sofia see this, here it is:

First, I validated Sofia’s feelings. Then, I gave her a safe space to share and be herself. Third, I gave her space to talk and share what was happening and reflected on what I heard. 

That kind of space helped her become more at ease with her emotions. It also helped her start to become her own best friend – the kind of friend that doesn’t try to change her feelings. 

She began to feel better about herself and respect her emotional needs through that process. 

Exercises You Can Use For Anxiety Counseling 

The worst part of anxiety is how it takes over. 

Anxiety has the power to dominate our thoughts and emotions entirely. 

Cultivating feelings of calm, peace, and ease will help immensely. 

If you can afford to hire someone like me, that’s the best method. 

In the meantime, though, here are a few exercises you can use:

Method One For Lessening Your Anxiety 

Get a gratitude journal. End each night by writing down five things you’re grateful for. 

This may not sound like a big thing, but that’s the point. 

Simplicity is always the best route to curing any issue. If it’s simple and straightforward you’ll do it. 

Gratitude can help you train your mind to seek emotions that counteract anxiety. 

Method Two For Calming Your Anxiety  

Conjure up a time in your life when you felt great. 

Maybe a moment when you felt calm and at peace. 

Close your eyes and imagine that moment. 

Put yourself there. Get in the moment. 

When you feel the peace of the moment – take a deep breath. 

Breath in the moment for a few seconds. 

Then come back to the moment. 

Just a short and simple like this done daily can help immensely. 

Method Three For Calming Anxiety 

Find someone in your life who you find to be very understanding, loving, and won’t judge you. 

Ask them if they can listen to you and give you some understanding. 

Share with this person what’s going on. 

Talking to someone in your life can help you find more self-empathy, understanding, and new feelings around the topics that make you anxious. 

Method Four For Curing Anxiety (the fastest route)

Hire someone like me who knows what it’s like to be anxious. 

Anxiety counseling with an expert can take you to your desired goal faster than anything else. 

If you’d like to speak with me, hit the ‘call now’ button on the top of the website. 

Another option is to book a complimentary couple’s consult, and apply those sessions directly for anxiety counseling.