Anxiety
Do You Struggle With Anxiety?
Do you experience racing thoughts or spiraling worries that you can’t seem to shut off?
Have you experienced uncomfortable physiological sensations that last much longer than you want, such as racing heart, a pit in your stomach, muscle tension, headaches or stomach aches?
Do you ever experience an impending sense of doom or dread that makes you want to curl up in a ball?
Do you ever find yourself avoiding things or people due to your anxiety or worry?
While worry and fear can be debilitating on their own, it’s common to experience a myriad of other unpleasant effects from your mind’s over-active alarm system. These can include irritability, poor sleep, muscle tension and tightness, feeling on edge or uneasy, and physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach aches, or chest pain. Nothing feels more isolating than experiencing immense suffering on the inside when, on the outside, it looks as though everything is okay. You likely know what it feels like to wear a “mask” to hide your symptoms from those around you, just to get through the day without breaking down.
Anxiety Doesn’t Back Down
Whether you developed an anxiety disorder after a stressful life event or you’ve struggled with anxiety all your life, you are well aware of the devastating effects anxiety can have on nearly every aspect of your life. You have devoted countless hours and an enormous amount of energy into trying to manage your anxiety. This may include reading numerous self-help articles or books, trying deep breathing or meditation, experimenting with substances, distracting yourself with social media or television, or trying to think positively. It’s likely that some of what you tried has helped temporarily, only for your anxiety to come back in full force a short time later.
Battling with anxiety day in and day out is absolutely exhausting. It’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed and defeated. If you are like other countless anxiety sufferers, you are no stranger to feeling the shame and weakness that often comes along with the never ending battle with anxiety.
All you want is to live life without constant worry or a looming sense of dread in your stomach. Fortunately, the highly specialized and targeted anxiety therapy we provide at Beachfront Anxiety Specialists can give you the tools and direction you need to overcome your anxiety disorder.
Anxiety Is Your Brain on Over-Protection Mode
While you have probably felt loneliness, isolation, or even a sense of weakness for having anxiety, anxiety is one of the most common manifestations of mental distress. About 30% of US adults will experience a clinically diagnosed anxiety disorder at some point in their life. Anxiety can take many different forms, including social anxiety (fear of being judged or evaluated), generalized anxiety (constant worry and physical symptoms such as stomach aches and muscle tension), phobias, illness anxiety (irrational fear of developing physical ailments), panic attacks, and more.
Despite being one of the most scary and uncomfortable psychological states, there is nothing inherently dangerous about anxiety. Our brains have evolved over millions of years to excel at surviving. While current day humanity has far surpassed our early cave-dwelling ancestors, the anxiety center of our brain (also called the “amygdala”) is still quite primitive. The human brain struggles to differentiate an actual life or death danger from stressful every day scenarios. When you have anxiety, your amygdala is sending false alarms alerting your mind and body to danger, when on the outside everything is okay. Essentially, your brain is trying to protect you, when there is nothing to protect you from! While this causes uncomfortable sensations and scary thoughts, it’s nothing that can cause long term damage or hurt you in any way. Our minds and bodies are capable of handle anything the amygdala can throw.
The good news is that by working with a true anxiety specialist, you and your therapist will discover the various ways your anxiety is being maintained leading to an over active amygdala response. You will learn how features of your anxiety such as negative thinking patterns, avoidance-fear cycles, and rumination plays out in your every-day life. Once you know how your anxiety works, you will learn how to stand up to your anxiety bully and take power back to live the rich, fulfilling life that you’ve always wanted.
Specialized Anxiety Therapy Will Provide Long Term Relief
You no longer have to face your anxiety alone. At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, we have devoted our professional careers to helping our clients overcome all forms of anxiety and to reclaim their lives. We are true specialists who use cutting-edge and psychologically validated interventions to help our clients attain the long-lasting relief they are seeking.
We combine our extensive experience treating anxiety with a warm, compassionate, and collaborative approach. Whether this is the first time you have sought help for anxiety or you have been to therapy in the past, anxiety focused treatment can help you get your life back on track by reducing symptoms and empowering you to make the changes you’ve been looking for. Many of our clients have had years of failed talk therapy, which has led them to seek out our expertise in working with anxiety in a more targeted, effective, and strategic way.
What to Expect in Sessions with Us
In our sessions, you and your therapist will work closely together to uncover the various ways your worries and uncomfortable feelings have been affecting your life. Anxiety symptoms can manifest in subtle and nuanced ways, and our therapists are highly skilled at conducting thorough assessments to ensure you are receiving high quality and comprehensive treatment. Over the course of the first several sessions, you and your therapist will be getting to know each other, developing a trusting relationship, assessing your symptoms and background, and learning about the nature of anxiety.
Once we have a solid understanding of how your specific anxiety symptoms are manifesting, we will work closely with you to develop a treatment plan that tailors high quality, science-based interventions to your specific goals, values, and background. We integrate several gold-standard therapeutic approaches to fundamentally change your relationship with anxiety. Exposure and response prevention, or “ERP” for short, has decades of research showing that it's one of the most effective and efficient forms of therapy for anxiety. In ERP, we will work with you to “cut off” the oxygen supply of anxiety by learning how to limit the avoidance behaviors that feed into a vicious anxiety cycle. We will also develop a targeted and strategic plan for you to gently face your fears and take actionable steps to getting your life back. When we face down anxiety concerns one step at a time, you will quickly feel empowered with the wins you attain. Over time your once crippling anxiety will fade away and soon become a distant memory.
Customizing Therapy Techniques for Your Needs
At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, we never take a cookie cutter approach to your treatment. We view our roles as active collaborators and coaches as much as we are therapists. Our job is to help you feel empowered to take down your anxiety by providing tools, insights, and gentle guidance. You are always in the driver’s seat of your treatment, determining where we go and how fast you’d like to get there.
While exposure and response prevention (ERP) is an essential ingredient in living a life that is not constrained by anxiety, our therapists are also highly trained in several other evidence-based modalities to help you meet your goals. We are able to weave in mindfulness, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Cognitive Therapy for anxiety. These approaches are powerful supplements to ERP by helping you connect with closely held values, changing your relationship with your negative thoughts and painful feelings, and learning how to ground yourself in the present moment when you are spiraling into the past or the future. Applying these other tools can make the process of facing your fears much less daunting.
You May Still Have Questions About Anxiety Therapy…
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Specialized anxiety therapy is an investment in your long-term sense of self and peace of mind. The goal of anxiety therapy is to help you develop mastery over your anxiety, empowering you to become your own anxiety therapist. Unlike traditional forms of talk therapy, anxiety treatment is active, collaborative, and goal-driven. Typical courses of treatment usually last between 6 to 12 months, although this can vary from client to client.
Our fees reflect the depth of our training and clinical expertise and allow our therapists to maintain smaller case loads so we can devote more attention to each of our clients. While we are not in-network with any insurance company, we do offer superbills which you can submit to your insurance company for out-of-network benefits.
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We work closely with our clients to help them gently face their fears one step at a time. An exposure exercise (the technical term for “facing your fears”) should never feel overwhelming or too scary, and you are always be fully in charge of the process. We work to strategically face down anxiety in bite sized pieces, where you will feel empowered by developing wins under your belt as you chip away at the hold your anxiety has over you. We also teach powerful skills that will help you navigate internal discomfort with ease and regulate your nervous system more effectively. These are tools that you will be able to take with you and use for the rest of your life.
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Traditional talk therapy is typically non-directive and non-structured. People bring up problems and struggles into therapy, where they feel heard and validated. While this tends to help people feel better in the short term, traditional talk therapy can actually make anxiety worse by inadvertently feeding into rumination and subtle avoidance cycles. At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, not only will you feel truly heard and understood, but you will learned and practice actionable skills that you can begin applying immediately.
You Can Attain Relief From Anxiety
If you would like to schedule an appointment or discuss any questions you may have regarding anxiety therapy, contact us below. We try to get back to all voicemails and emails within 24 hours. Before starting therapy, we always offer free 20 minute phone consultations to make sure we’re a good fit to work together.