Published April 23, 2025
Written by Jennifer Ramirez, Medically Reviewed by Damla Ricks
Anxiety is a normal feeling that many people experience, especially as you dwell on the unknown. However, what happens when anxiety becomes so severe that it starts to affect your daily life? Significant anxiety can impact work, school, and personal relationships. Symptoms can be physical and mental, including headaches, digestive issues, and feeling irritable. Other ways it can impact your daily life include:
- Difficulty concentrating
- Affect work or school performance with direct impact in grades, job performance, and overall success
- Avoidance and withdrawal, including missing work/school and withdrawing from social situations
- Relationship disagreements
- Depression; Anxiety and depression are often linked
- Substance Use; In some cases anxiety can turn to substance use as a way of coping
- Reduced quality of life due to constant worrying
How Can Therapy Help Anxiety?
Therapy, particularly talk therapy, has shown to help in reducing anxiety symptoms. It provides a place to understand your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Therapy helps you identify and correct negative thoughts and beliefs. Therapy requires you to face your fears and practice new skills. Anxiety can be filled with excessive worry and intrusive thoughts. Therapy helps you better understand your thoughts and behaviors. So how can therapy help?
- Helps you identify the roots and triggers to your anxiety
- Assists in developing tools and strategies to work through anxiety
- Confront your fears; by confronting fears you learn to overcome them and build resilience
- Develop a Treatment Plan; You will want to start with goals and determine how goals are considered met
- Improve relationships; Anxiety can lead to issues with communication or avoidance; By working on these issues and perhaps including family counseling, relationships can be improved
- Confidence; the ultimate result to live an anxiety free life with a new sense of confidence build from the strategies you have learned in counseling
Best Type of Therapy for Anxiety
Therapy comes in all forms, so it is important to find the best fit for you. Therapists typically have a specialized format they like to use, but can change it to accommodate your wants and needs. These are good questions to ask in an initial session as some anxiety can be caused by past trauma that may require a more specialized form of treatment, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) or Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Below are a few types of therapy often used for anxiety:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT); Helps identify negative thought patterns
- Acceptance Therapy; Clients learn to accept and tolerate uncomfortable feelings instead of trying to suppress
- Interpersonal Therapy
- Art Therapy; This is experience oriented involving art to practice mindfulness or relaxation
- Psychodynamic Therapy; Most intense form that does a deep examination of ones thoughts, fears and desired;
- Emotion Focused Therapy; individuals understand history of emotions and learn how to use emotions in a health way
- Narrative Therapy helps individuals with the power to take control of their lives by creating new, positive stories and reinterpreting past experiences
How Our Fort Worth Area Counselors Can Help You
At Healing First Counseling, our therapists are trained to help you identify and develop treatment plans to help you live a more fulfilled life. We provide a confidential, safe place to explore your emotions and meet your needs. We offer virtual or in-person sessions to accommodate your schedule and get you started in your mental health journey. Reach out today to schedule a session with one of our Fort Worth counselors.
Damla Ricks is a Licensed Professional Counselor working on her Ph.D. in Family and Marriage Counseling. She is trained in trauma and system based therapy. She works with adults, couples, and families. On the side, she is also a full time college instructor in Communication Studies with 17 years of experience in higher education.