Anxiety Therapy

Do Anxious Thoughts Overwhelm You?

• Are they keeping you up at night?

• Do worries about work, relationships, or even insignificant things run through your head?

• Are you preoccupied with other people’s judgements?

• Has all of this left you too tense to enjoy life the way you’d like?

Living with chronic anxiety can be exhausting, like you’re driving in fifth gear all day long. It’s just not a sustainable way to live.

The Impact of Anxiety

Anxiety can impact every aspect of your life, including your relationships, career, and your physical health. Worries and fears might prevent you from fully engaging with the world, resulting in missed opportunities or an inability to experience the meaningful life you deserve.  

For some of you, this might result in avoidance of the very things in life you wish to pursue, such as relationships or job opportunities. For others, anxiety can manifest as perfectionism, constantly rethinking and reworking every angle or possibility, and rarely experiencing satisfaction with your decisions or accomplishments.

However you experience anxiety, you probably just want the anxious thoughts to stop, or you want to be less “in your head” about everything. Fortunately, with the help of anxiety counseling, you can learn how to quiet those thoughts, ease the tension, and breathe easy again.

The Most Common Mental Health Issue

Anxiety is the most common mental health issue, with an estimated 1/3 of the population diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in their lifetime (Muskin 2023). That’s a lot of people!

It can take on many forms such as generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic, phobias, OCD, or a combination of these. No one person experiences anxiety the same as another, but the common thread among all anxiety disorders is that they interfere with living a pleasurable life.

With numbers this high, you might be wondering why anxiety is so pervasive?

We Live in an Anxious Culture

There are many factors and cultural shifts that have contributed to the pervasiveness of anxiety. Our world is fast-paced and demanding. Smartphones leave us tethered to our jobs. Social media puts everyone’s life on display for judgement, and there’s a never-ending stream of options and decisions to make which leave us with a perpetual sense of fear of missing out (FOMO). The DC area, in particular, can be stressful and competitive with its population of highly educated professionals, intense work culture, and high cost-of-living.

Add to that the polarization of our political world and it’s no wonder so many people are on edge.

You’re Just Trying to Take Control of This

The natural response to all of this stress is to try to push out the noise and wrestle back control. This is just your body’s normal stress response to the perceived risks or dangers of life.

The good news is that you don’t need to take control or even eliminate the stress that’s inundating you. You just need to learn some new strategies for responding to it. With an experienced therapist and some willingness to practice, you can learn how to manage your anxiety and get back to living life again.

Learn Lifelong Skills to Manage Your Anxiety

I help clients do this by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for anxiety. CBT is an evidenced-based form of psychotherapy that’s considered the gold-standard treatment for anxiety. It’s effective because the concepts of CBT are logical and simple to use. My goal, as your therapist, is to teach you how to use these skills on your own so you’re able to manage your anxiety independently.

What to Expect from Sessions

My general therapy approach to working with anxiety is helping clients address two errors of judgment that are inherent in anxiety. The first error is related to risk and safety. When someone is anxious, they are often overestimating how dangerous a situation might be and ignoring potential signs of safety. For example, you might be worrying about an upcoming performance review even though you’ve had positive feedback from your supervisor. The second anxiety error people often make is an underestimation, or lack of confidence in their ability to cope if something negative does occur. For example, you might fear that you’d freeze or lash out if you received negative feedback. In therapy, we work on correcting both errors. We help you more accurately assess risk and build confidence in your coping skills. That’s the cognitive part of CBT.

We also work on behavior. The fuel for anxiety is avoidance, and we all engage in this. For example, if we’re afraid of roller coasters, we probably avoid riding them. This protects us in the short-term because we don’t have to experience the anxiety, but it prolongs our anxiety in the long-term because we never learn that we can tolerate roller coasters (or performance reviews!). The solution to this is exposure. One of the primary behavioral components of CBT involves helping you gradually build your confidence by exposing you to the situations you’ve been avoiding.

I approach all of this as a collaboration. You’re coming to therapy because you want help problem-solving your anxiety, otherwise you’d be working on it by yourself. This means I’m an active player in our sessions, but so are you. My philosophy is that people don’t get better simply from participating in a weekly therapy appointment. Instead, they get better by making changes in their thinking and behavior outside of sessions, in their actual life. To help facilitate these changes, our sessions will be structured, goal-oriented, and will involve active participation on your part to make sure our time together is efficient and supports your progress.

Because anxiety is the most common mental health disorder, most of the people who see me have an anxiety diagnosis and it’s the primary focus of my psychotherapy practice. I was lucky enough to be introduced to CBT treatment for anxiety through the Beck Institute, the preeminent institute for cognitive therapy, during a training series I completed 20 years ago and have since completed countless other CBT trainings. I also teach other clinicians how to provide CBT to their own clients. 

Finding the Right Balance

While chronic anxiety can overwhelm us, anxiety itself isn’t all bad. It’s a completely normal emotion, and an important one too. When we accurately assess situations, anxiety does keeps us safe from harm. It motivates us when we need to do a good job and helps us prioritize things that are important to us. Because of this, we don’t want to eliminate it. Instead, we want to strike the right balance, so our anxiety works for and not against us. This is what we’ll help you do. While most people experience a reduction in their anxiety in the first few sessions, learning how to manage and balance anxiety for a lifetime does take practice. I’ll be there to guide you every step of the way, helping you to practice new adaptive strategies, eliminate unhelpful ones, and create a toolkit of skills just for you.

But You May Still Have Questions about Anxiety Therapy…

I’ve tried a lot of different things that haven’t worked. Why should this be any different?

It may not be. But if you’ve read this far, it likely means you are ready to try something new. I promise that I’ll work hard to listen and help you customize a plan to better manage your anxiety. All I ask of you is an open mind and a little motivation. If one thing doesn’t work, then we’ll try another until we find something that fits your own unique needs.

What if my racing thoughts don’t stop?

The voice in our head is a normal part of being human and we all experience it. We can’t stop or control it. Instead, you’ll learn how to do the opposite, detach from it. The motto will be: “Just because I think something, doesn’t mean it’s true.” You’ll learn how to talk back with more accuracy to anxious thoughts, so they have less power over you. You’ll also learn how to mindfully accept anxious thoughts so you can go about your business without being controlled by them. It’s likely that the thoughts will quiet down on their own simply by practicing these skills.

Exposing myself to the things that make me anxious sounds scary. Do I have to do this?

It does sound scary. That’s actually the point. But rest assured you don’t have do to anything you don’t want to do. The only things you’ll expose yourself to are things you choose. And you’ll make those decisions based on what’s important to you, not me. But when you decide to confront your fears, we’ll make sure that you are prepared and confident that it’s moving you toward what you value in life.

Take the First Step

If this sounds like a good fit for you, take the first step toward getting yourself an anxiety therapist and schedule a 20-minute video consultation. You can also email or call me with questions, and I’ll do my best to respond within 24 hours.

Philip R. Muskin, M.D., M.A. “What are anxiety disorders,” American Psychiatric Association. June 2023. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/anxiety-disorders/what-are-anxiety-disorders#:~:text=Anxiety%20disorders%20are%20the%20most,a%20number%20of%20psychotherapeutic%20treatments.