Diane Rooker, the founder of Pearl Counselling and Parenting, provides support for Adults and children experiencing anxiety. Anxiety can be a difficult issue for some people to come to terms with and to talk about.
Anxiety is more than feeling stressed or over concerned. These feelings are quite common when dealing with a stressful situation and usually, the anxiety leaves when the situation has been removed. Anxiety is when these unpleasant feeling doesn’t go away and they return for no particular reason and they cannot be controlled.
One in five men and one in three women will experience some form of anxiety in their lifetime, over two million Australians experience anxiety per year. I am now seeing more and more adolescents and children experience symptoms of anxiety.
Dealing with anxiety sooner rather than later has a quicker recovery rate. Why, because the more we experience this feeling the bigger it gets, it’s like cancer that starts off small then it can become consuming if not treated.
Treating anxiety is relatively quick and pain-free
I deal with two things when working with anxiety
1. the symptoms such as shaking, fast heart rate uncontrollable thoughts
2. the core issue, like cancer the core issue could have begun as a very small issue which over time grew.
Anxiety can be painful and completely overwhelming, making it tough to continue with daily living. Regardless of how you are feeling right now, Diane can quickly assess your current state and commence counselling at a pace you can cope with.
Counselling and Neuro Trance Psychotherapy is used to treat Anxiety
When to seek help
As soon as possible – Everyone has times in their life when they feel anxious, nervous or stressed. Feeling anxious is a natural response from your body when you face something new that seems scary, or when you feel threatened. This anxiety (the ‘fight or flight’ response) exists in everybody as a survival mechanism and will usually pass once the cause of the anxiety (the ‘stressor’) is understood. And after a short time, life returns to normal, and we feel calm. However, some people live with these feelings of anxiety on a daily basis and without any apparent reason—this is unhealthy anxiety that can benefit greatly from counselling.
What Causes Anxiety
Stressful thoughts and situations cause anxiety, worrying about something relatively small can soon escalate into experiencing symptoms of anxiety, the trick is to learn HOW to understand your thoughts, to have control of them rather than the other way around. Learn how to keep thoughts in perspective, understand what is the reality of a situation and what are assumptions. Diane has a great process for this to happen.
When anxiety occurs stress hormone is being released into the body such as Adrenaline, when we feel we are in an unsafe or life-threatening situation, then we need to use the adrenaline to either fight or flight so in this instance its a good thing to use the adrenaline to keep us safe, then our body can self-regulate and return to calm when it knows its safe. At times the event was extremely terrifying and the brain could not put the experience into memory so the stress hormone runs through the body 24 hours a day seven days a week looking for the danger.
Also if the traumatic situation caused the person to freeze then the adrenaline did not have the opportunity to be expelled and it gets stuck in the body. Then symptoms began to appear such as anxiety the body is always alert and cant relax. Can you imagine if you ran a car continuously after a while it will begin to fall apart?
Circumstances that can Cause Anxiety?
It can be passed down from your parents, yes it’s true, crazy as it seems. Being in an ongoing stressful environment. Having experienced an extremely stressful or life-threatening event. Substance abuse such as drugs and alcohol. Feeling unsafe.
Symptoms of Anxiety
Anxiety is much more than just feeling stressed or worried—it can be downright overwhelming. Many sufferers of anxiety find it hard to do even the simplest tasks.
Symptoms of Anxiety include:
- trouble sleeping (insomnia)
- being afraid or uncomfortable in everyday situations
- being on edge or restless
- getting irritated easily
- having panic attacks
- changes in your appetite
- having trouble concentrating
- depression
- feeling hypersensitive
- OCD
- changes in your body’s natural state (e.g. racing heart, tightness in your chest, hot and cold flushes, obsessive negative thoughts, and muscle pain).
Contact Diane at Pearl Counselling
We have all had different upbringings and experiences in life and different levels of resilience so the amount of anxiety a person can suffer from will vary from person to person, don’t compare yourself to others.
If you are experiencing ongoing feelings of anxiety, contact Diane at Pearl Counselling to book a suitable appointment time and start to heal.