When you have anxiety, sometimes it can feel like your own brain is your worst enemy. Overthinking every decision, needing everything to be perfect, needing to plan out every detail, thinking and worrying about everything that could go wrong and trying to come up with solutions to those problems that may never happen. Sounds exhausting doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, humans experience anxiety as a protective mechanism. The right amount of anxiety keeps us safe, too little and we do things that are dangerous and cause harm or death, but too much anxiety and it can be immobilizing stopping us from taking action or performing our best because it starts to consume our brain and our body.

Through therapy our goal is to help reduce anxious symptoms when they have become overactive and are starting to hurt you instead of help you. This is typically done through a combination of techniques that help you regulate your nervous system (help your body feel calm) as well as challenging your anxious thoughts to see if there is some sort of danger that actually needs to address or not. The goal is to over time help your brain and body recalibrate to a more helpful amount of anxiety (because yes it is sometimes appropriate to have anxiety) as opposed to being stuck in a state of hypervigilance and constant worry which can be very exhausting for you and those around you.