Anxiety Therapy in Chicago
Anxiety is not all bad; it can be protective and productive.
But sometimes anxiety can lead to impairment in functioning, unhealthy behaviors, and debilitating physical symptoms.
Whether you’re experiencing general anxiety, social anxiety, phobias, or panic disorder, we can support you with developing tools to decrease anxiety and improve your functioning in work, relationships, and daily life.
Anxiety can show up differently for each of us.
Symptoms of anxiety might include physical symptoms, like nausea, headache, muscle tightness, racing heart, and fatigue. Mental symptoms might be racing thoughts, brain fog, and irritability.
Therapists at Common Thread Counseling can help determine a treatment plan that helps you reclaim your life with lowered anxiety .
Anxiety conditions that therapy can help with include:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder:
GAD is chronic or daily worry about multiple issues over an extended period of time that is hard to control.
Worries may be about:
work
health
family
your partner
the state of the world
your children or pets
finances
Unlike situational stress that resolves once a specific issue passes, GAD tends to have a free-floating quality, jumping from one worry to the next. Many people with GAD describe a sense of ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’, even when they can't always identify what, and often recognize their worry is disproportionate to the problem itself.
Having an anxiety disorder can make you feel like you are always in a state of high alert, which can cause difficulties in daily life, including concentration, performing daily tasks, self care, interacting with others.
Social anxiety:
Social anxiety is when you feel intense worry about being judged or scrutinized in social settings. This type of anxiety can lead to avoidance and interference in daily life, like work, events, and everyday interactions. Social anxiety can turn an errand, running into someone at school pick-up, or a work presentation into a consuming mental back-and-forth.
If you have social anxiety, you may experience anticipatory anxiety leading up to the social event, as well as ruminating after the event, which may look like overthinking what you said, how you acted, or someone else’s perceived response to you.
Phobias:
A phobia is a marked, persistent, and unreasonable fear about an object or event. The fear is disruptive to daily living and often leads to avoidance when you know this object or situation will be present.
Phobias could include specific phobias or agoraphobia.
Specific phobias could be an animal, a fear of heights, or situational, like flying. Agoraphobia refers to situations where someone fears events or situations that they feel like they could not escape or get help if they panic or feel trapped. These situations could include public transportation, crowds, or small closed spaces.
Panic disorder:
Panic disorder involves recurrent, unexpected panic attacks - sudden surges of intense fear or discomfort that peak within minutes, often accompanied by physical symptoms like a racing heart, chest tightness, shortness of breath, dizziness, trembling, sweating, nausea, or a sense of unreality.
If you have panic disorder, you have persistent worry about having another panic attack. This often leads to avoiding certain places, situations, or activities out of fear they might trigger an attack or make escape difficult.
Physical sensations, like a slightly elevated heart rate, get misread as dangerous, which triggers more anxiety, which intensifies the physical sensations, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
Our Approach to Therapy for Anxiety
In our sessions together, we can help you develop insight into the root of your anxiety and how to lower it by:
naming the symptoms associated with anxiety
identifying specific triggers for the anxiety
developing coping strategies to lower the anxious response
distinguish productive problem-solving from unproductive rumination or worry spirals
Practical skills we teach:
reframing
cognitive restructuring
journaling
behavioral rehearsal
decatastrophizing
challenging all or nothing thinking
exposure therapy
mindfulness and grounding techniques to stay present rather than getting pulled into anticipatory "what if" thinking
increasing your tolerance for uncertainty