Many believe anxiety starts with sensations they feel in their body such as with their heart racing, light headedness, or chest tightness. However, those sensations are only part of the story..
Anxiety is like a tag team between your mind and body. When you worry or stress, your body can react with things like a racing heart, tense muscles, shortness of breath, sweating, or stomach troubles. Those experiences are associated with what we define as a fight-or-flight response.
Counseling Hoboken; Mollie Busino, LCSW, Director of Mindful Power. Mollie has had extensive training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Fertility Counseling, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Her work focuses on Anxiety, Depression, Anger Management, Career Changes, OCD, Relationship, Dating Challenges, Insomnia, & Postpartum Depression and Anxiety.
Your body’s fight-or-flight response is like an alarm system. It gets activated when your mind thinks there’s danger, even if there’s no real threat. This release of stress hormones can cause those physical symptoms. Anxious thoughts and physical symptoms then create a loop. The thoughts cause physical reactions, which lead to more anxious thoughts. For example, feeling your heart race might make you think you’re having a heart attack, which ramps up anxiety even more.
When you can identify the thoughts associated with the physical symptoms by asking what am I MOST concerned about at this moment or in the past few days then the source of the anxiety can truly be addressed. Such sources can include a response from a past trauma, desire for control, fear of the unpredictable, needing certainty, and more.
Schedule a session with one of our Anxiety Specialists.