Cognitive behavior therapy for anxiety is therapy to break the cycle of wrong thinking. It gives a person back control, educates and changes the way certain patterns or way of life have been lived.
From childhood or through traumatic events, we learn a set of coping skills that can become coping mechanisms. This type of treatment has been shown to be very effecting in treating anxiety and helping patients understand why they do what they do and how to change it.
When a person feels fear, the body will react as if that fear was real. So if you feared that wind whipping through the trees would make them crash down around you, your body would release adrenaline in response to that fear.
Now if you were actually in danger, that adrenaline could give you a burst of energy that could make you flee from the harm in order to protect yourself. That's a healthy response. An unhealthy response is living in anxiety because of what does not take place. For example, you fear getting fired. It hasn't happened, but you worry about it. Not an every now and then worry but an all the time worry.
You fear that you're going to have an accident on the way to work. You fear that something might happen to your children, to your parents, to your spouse. You fear that your house might burn down or you might lose all your savings. Everyone has passing thoughts where a twinge of worry or anxiety will occur.
That's just living life in the world we live in. But when the thoughts don't pass by, when they stick around in our minds and we play them over again like a broken record, that signals a problem. Cognitive behavior therapy for anxiety helps the mind to stop playing that broken record and helps sufferers to move beyond the place they're stuck.
We all have a belief system but not all the things we believe are actually true. We can change what is good and what is right and jumble it up in our minds with beliefs that are harmful and wrong. Let's say that you have a fear of snakes because you stepped on one as a child and it bit you.
You have an opportunity to visit an aquarium but don't go because you're worried that the snakes might get out of their cages and you'll get bitten. Even thinking about getting bitten again makes you feel like you're going to faint. Your heart starts pounding and your head begins to ache.
This is a physical response to the fear of what could have happened but hasn't. Cognitive behavior therapy for anxiety can help people overcome the anxiety that keeps them living in fear..
PanicBuster.com was created by anxiety treatment expert David Mellinger, MSW (RESUME). Click on the link to learn more about anxiety, worry, phobias, and obsessions and compulsions (OCD)