When you suffer from anxiety, you may find it difficult to live out your everyday life. Tasks like driving and dining at a restaurant can become overwhelming. You may suffer from symptoms that leave you homebound and unable to venture beyond your front door. 

Instead of allowing panic attacks, shortness of breath, and agoraphobia to limit your everyday life, you can seek treatment for your anxiety. You can benefit from enlisting the help of an experienced therapist to teach you coping mechanisms and uncover your anxiety's roots.

Learning Coping Mechanisms

When you seek treatment from a licensed therapist, you can learn coping mechanisms to manage and overcome your anxiety. These skills can teach your brain not to send anxiety signals to parts of your body, such as your stomach, diaphragm, and muscles. They can provide sufficient distraction to keep your attention focused elsewhere and allow you to learn how to live normally again.

They can include simple tricks like putting an ice pack on the back of your neck or putting your hand in icy cold water to calm a panic attack. The cold sensations force your brain to divert its attention from the panic to the drastic change of temperature on your skin.

These techniques can also include listening to music through headphones when you go into a store or counting five things that you can see, hear, smell, and touch. These distractions allow you to retrain your brain, show your anxiety that you are not afraid of it, and gradually learn how to live with it.

Uncovering the Roots

Your licensed therapist can also work closely with you to uncover the roots of your anxiety. It could stem from unresolved abuse that you endured as a child. it can also be the result of a traumatic brain injury that you sustained after a car wreck. 

Once you uncover the roots of your anxiety, you can begin working with your therapist to overcome them. You can confront bad memories from your childhood and learn to forgive yourself or others that cause you to feel anxious. You can also undergo medical treatment if necessary to heal from a traumatic injury to your brain.

A licensed therapist can lead you to manage and overcome your extreme anxiety. You can learn important coping mechanisms to deal with your anxiety. You can also uncover its roots and confront or seek treatment for them. Contact a therapist like Donald McEachran, PhD today for more information.