Anxiety and Depression

Life today is stressful.

Doesn’t it feel like everyone has anxiety these days? Is yours like everyone else’s, or is your anxiety preventing you from living your life?

While driving on a major highway, your heart rate suddenly spikes, making you feel like you may have a heart attack, and the next exit is 15 miles away. You don’t know if you can make it that far, and you feel shaken and scared. “What the heck is happening to me?”

Not that long ago…

Once you were a social and outgoing person with lots of friends and often busy every night after work. Then, WHAM! You run out of gas. All you want to do is sleep, but you can’t.

You have no appetite and 80 unread text messages. You’ve stopped going to the gym; everything feels off. Your friends keep calling you to see where you’ve been, but you don’t have the energy to call them back. What would you say anyways?

Anxiety and depression may be the cause.

Signs of depression differ from person to person. Still, the common denominators are lack of interest in things you used to enjoy, difficulty sleeping, loss or change in appetite, and social withdrawal.

Depression and anxiety often go hand in hand, with feeling incapable of handling your regular life escalating and you feeling out of control. The risk of depression and anxiety is that the underlying cause could be so many things that it’s often hard to figure out on your own.

With a family-of-origin orientation, I have found that anxiety and depression tend to run in families. If our mother was depressed, typically, we haven’t learned good coping skills to deal with life’s challenges, and we internalize them, which causes both anxiety and depression.

Getting to the root of anxiety and depression takes special skills focused on your specific responses to stress, feeling overwhelmed and out of control. Depression can feel like you are in a black hole, with a loss of hope and dark thoughts, and anxiety can keep you in a constant state of distress that results in continuous worrying.

Getting professional help takes courage, and it works!

Therapy can help identify the underlying cause of why you experience anxiety and depression.

For instance, anxiety can result from long-standing problems at work or with relationships. Therapy can help you learn to manage the stress from pressure and identify the triggers that make you anxious.

Depression also has many causes. Some may relate to situations experienced early in your life. Other personal problems or illnesses may be the cause. With therapy, you can learn to identify events in your life that may be responsible for how you feel. Then, you can develop ways of coping with situations that create depression.

While working together, we can identify the sources of stress that cause your anxiety and depression.

Contact me today because navigating alone is not the answer.