According to the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approach to anxiety, one of the reasons that overcoming anxiety can be so difficult is that anxiety generates vicious cycles involving your physiological, cognitive, behavioural, and emotional domains. We looked at these four components of anxiety in a previous post. Now we’ll look at how they act together to form vicious cycles that create and maintain anxiety.

In the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) model of anxiety, the vicious cycle begins with an anxiety-provoking situation. This situation can be something external such as a work commitment, a trip, a social engagement, or any other event happening in the future that you’re worried about. Anxiety can also be provoked by something internal such as a physiological sensation, a thought about something you’re dreading, or an unpleasant emotion. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most common concerns that leads people to seek counselling and therapy is feeling overwhelmed by stress and anxiety, and not knowing how to get any relief.

What often happens is we let our stress or anxiety build and build all day without doing anything about it, trying to ignore it, and just hoping it will go away. Then, when we finally can’t take it anymore and start feeling overwhelmed, we’re desperate to find a way to manage all of this stress and anxiety and get some relief, but at that point, it can be so hard to get any relief.

The more we allow stress and anxiety to accumulate, the more difficult they become to address. That’s why one of the keys to managing stress and anxiety is to find ways to not let them build up so much in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently interviewed for an article in Inside Toronto about the stress caused by dealing with difficult people. Especially in the workplace, these difficult people and negative influences can create a great deal of stress.

I find that work stress is one of the most common reasons people come for counselling or therapy, and often the biggest source of stress is difficult bosses and co-workers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are closely related. Our thoughts affect how we feel and what we do; our feelings affect the way we think and act; and our actions affect our thoughts and feelings.

For instance, if we’re feeling anxious, we’ll think the worst is going to happen and act in ways to avoid doing anything that could provoke anxiety. If we’re feeling depressed, we tend to have very negative thoughts and withdraw from others, and these thoughts and behaviours make us even more depressed.

Cognitive therapy, also known as cogntive behavioural therapy or CBT, utilizes these relationship between your thoughts (also called cognitions), your actions (or behaviours) and your feelings or emotions. Because our thoughts, our feelings (or moods or emotions) and our actions (or behaviour) are so closely linked, making changes in any one of these areas tends to bring about changes in the others. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across a few videso from the UK’s National Health Service that I want to share here. The first video provides a good explanation about how cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) works and who could benefit from it from an expert on CBT.

Next is a video about Laurie’s depression and how cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) helped him to cope with day-to-day life. Read the rest of this entry »

Anxiety that can affect us in a variety of different ways. Sometimes there are specific situations that provoke anxiety, such as social situations or phobias. Sometimes we experience acute intense periods of anxiety in the form of panic attacks.

Other times anxiety doesn’t have a specific focus, and but tends to be more constant and persistent. Instead of the intense bursts of anxiety of a panic attack, sometimes anxiety is more chronic, and often takes the form of excessive and seemingly uncontrollable worrying.

Cognitive behvioural therapy (CBT), sometimes called cogntive therapy, is a type of thereapy that focuses on how various factors within us and our environment interact with each other to to produce and maintain many issues that people struggle with such as anxiety and depression.

In CBT/cognitive therapy, we recgonize that, in addition to your environment, there are generally four components that act together to create and maintain anxiety: the physiological, the cognitive, the behavioural, and the emotional. These are described below.

The Mental Health Foundation in the UK has developed a Be Mindful webpage that is an excellent resource for information about the benefits of mindfulness. The following quote is from their webpage:

How you handle the way you feel plays a big part your mental health. In difficult times, it is not unusual to focus solely on negative thoughts and feelings and become consumed by them.

 

Mindfulness helps you change the way they think, feel and act. It helps you to break free from a downward spiral of negative thought and action, and make positive choices that support your wellbeing. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the different types of anxiety, panic attacks can be particularly overwhelming. Panic attacks are intense periods of extreme anxiety that come on suddenly and usually subside within a few minutes, though can sometimes last longer.

People experiencing a panic attack often feel like they’re having a heart attack, or are going to faint or are going crazy. Panic disorder refers to unexpected and repeated panic attacks, accompanied by persistent concern about having another panic attack, or changes in behaviours, such as avoiding certain situations, designed to prevent another panic attack from occurring.

The benefits you can experience from learning to become more mindful are virtually limitless. Mindfulness allows you to relate to and deal directly with whatever is happening in your life. Instead of struggling to escape, suppress or avoid distressing thoughts and feelings, mindfulness helps you approach whatever is going on in your life, in your thoughts, and with your emotions, without becoming overwhelmed.

When you start being more mindful and start living in the present moment, you’ll experience your life more fully, and become more in touch with yourself, who you are, what is important to you, and what you want out of life.