Stress, Anxiety & Panic
"Anxiety" is becoming an overused term - covering a whole range of feelings from butterflies in your stomach, to apprehension, jitters, hesitation, nervousness, persistent worry, and actual fearfulness and panic.
These experiences can be quite uncomfortable and confusing, so it's perfectly understandable to want help for any level of "anxiety." At the same time, it's important to not over-pathologize what's going on. Even full-blown panic makes sense when you know what's going on in your mind and body.
So let's break it down...
Stress, anxiety and panic are cousins, and sometimes one grows into the other.
Stress usually shows up as low-level or short-term symptoms that don't substantially get in the way of your day-to-day functioning very much or very long. The symptoms often include irritability, insomnia, fatigue, appetite changes, muscle tension and headaches, and heart rate and blood pressure can be elevated. If stress becomes more intense or long-term, it can become what is referred to as "burnout."
Anxiety is essentially worrying. It is an experience inside your own mind, focused on troubleshooting the future. Although what you're worried about is often based in realistic concerns, these get blown way out of proportion. You think over and over about what could go wrong and how to prevent it, believing that somehow it will all be okay as long as you cover every base. This makes it difficult to focus or think clearly about anything other than what you’re worried about. In your body, anxiety (worry) often involves muscle tension or headaches, being overly alert to whether something's going wrong, reacting strongly to small changes, trouble sleeping because you can't stop thinking, frequent sighing, and pacing.
Panic attacks are very intense, easily identifiable events. They may seem to come out of the blue, especially the first time. The core experience is an abrupt surge in intense fear or discomfort that reaches a peak within minutes. The physical symptoms that accompany this can feel debilitating, and typically include some or all of the following: heart pounding or chest pain (you might think you're having a heart attack), shortness of breath/hyperventilating, lightheadedness (feeling you might faint), feeling you're choking, mind racing, sweaty palms, flushing (hot) or chills (cold), trembling or shaking, feeling unsteady, nausea or abdominal distress, numbness or tingling, fear or losing control or losing your mind, and dissociation (feeling not normally connected to yourself or things and people around you).
Note: You might also take a look at "Social Anxiety & Phobias" (under "Specialties"). These challenges feature anxiety and panic related to specific situations.
How does therapy help?
In therapy for any of these issues, we start by learning about the nervous system's hard-wired response to any sense of threat. It doesn't matter if the threat is real or a memory or just a "what if" scenario - the nervous system gets mobilized to get you out of whatever trouble it perceives.
There are easy-to-learn techniques for calming your nervous system, through a combination of correct breathing and releasing muscle tension, sometimes adding in visualizations. People I work with are often surprised at how quickly we can reduce stress and worry, and eliminate full-blown panic attacks.
Once your day-to-day is not dominated by the feelings and physical symptoms or stress, anxiety or panic, the focus of therapy becomes learning to look at situations in a new, less frightening way, and develop better coping mechanisms and problem-solving skills.