Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Clarksburg, MD.

Stress and anxiety have always existed. Our brains encode fear easily as a way to protect us from danger. A small amount of angst can help us feel motivated, but when it grows, it can stop us in our tracks. With the rise of technology, many people feel submersed in stress. Constant emails make us feel like work never ends. We text at meals times instead of having real conversations. Consider the stressful impact of 24/7 access to negative news reports, traffic filled commutes, over-schedulled lives, and its easy to see a recipe for anxiety. Learning to be mindful, taking breaks and truly connecting emotionally can create confidence to face fears and even dissolve them.

There are at least four components to reducing anxiety. The first is to learn self-soothing techniques. the second is to become aware of the thoughts and images which are making you anxious and to deliberately choose other thoughts and images. The third is to discover and face what you are most afraid of. Sometimes, when there has been trauma, this fear is something that has already happened and from which you have not recovered. Often it is something out of your control, a fact of life, like death! We need to make peace with these, accept their reality and make the best of what we have. I have some excellent tools from hypnosis and a field of study called NLP to speed your progress.

To help you manage your stress and anxiety symptoms, we start with understanding the nature and patterns of your symptoms in relation to environmental triggers, traumatic life events, and unhelpful thinking patterns that influence your daily perspective. Using a collaborative alliance, we will look for better ways to manage both your external stressors and internal reactions. A cognitive-behavioral approach offers practical methods to understand how thought patterns influence emotional reactions and behaviors. By redirecting and re-framing your thoughts with alternative thoughts, you can experience a reduction in unpleasant emotions and an increase in personal effectiveness.