Treatment for your anxiety in Lyngby

Anxiety is most often characterized by an internal sensation or an external influence that makes you uneasy or afraid. The anxiety is difficult to deal with because what we do to make it go away, on the one hand, helps here and now, but on the other hand, does not help well enough to remove the anxiety completely. These actions, called safety behavior, will over time increase the anxiety because it confirms how much power what we fear has over us.

Hence we become anxious about the anxiety – that is to say that just the thought of being afraid can happen and that we will then become anxious, causes anxiety.

Anxiety treatment

Anxiety treatment is about reducing anxiety levels so you are more free to live the life you want. Part of the treatment involves finding out more about:

• How did the anxiety arise, how long has it been there?
• What thoughts are controlling anxiety now?
• What do you do to help yourself when you get anxious?
• What thoughts of disaster arise when anxiety grows and you feel unable to control it?

The answers to these questions may be completely clear to you, or they may be vague sensations. Both are quite normal.

Exposure, that is, approaching what you fear, can be an important part of the treatment for anxiety. Approaching what we are afraid of can be either an action, or it can be talking about it. For me, it is absolutely crucial that we work at a pace that is suitable and safe for you.

Especially about health anxiety & illness anxiety

Especially in the last year, we have all been in the extraordinary situation of having to deal with the Coronavirus (COVID-19), and the fear that we ourselves or those we care about will be affected by serious illness. This has created an increased incidence of disease anxiety / health anxiety or discomfort at the thought of being able to infect others.

Read more about illness anxiety / health anxiety hereThis can lead to psychological reactions such as:

• Fear of death
• Illness anxiety / health anxiety
• Contagion anxiety

Many have become more aware of the body’s signals and have an increased level of anxiety when it “makes a sound”. For some this is a new experience and for others it has been enhanced by the increased focus from the surroundings.

Working with health anxiety is also very much about strengthening one’s sense of what to take care of – when the sense of danger is legitimate – and when it is more helpful to seek to calm oneself and tolerate the sense of danger. This is difficult and demanding work, because we are biologically equipped to respond to danger signals – it is essentially necessary for our survival.

Another difficult condition is that we currently have less opportunity for close physical and psychological contact with the people we normally have around us in daily life. This makes it harder to help each other deal with difficult thoughts and feelings.

The increased isolation can make it even tougher to handle difficult emotions – both those related to illness and to life in general.

Typical reactions to isolation are: anxious and depressive feelings. One of the most important things you can do to prevent unhappiness during these months is to maintain your network as well as possible under the given conditions.