Reduce Your Anxiety with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Therapy Can Ease Anxiety
So You’ll Feel Better

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, commonly called CBT, is a mainstay of successful anxiety treatment. If you’re living with anxiety (feeling bad, anxious, or scared too often), you know the feelings are paralyzing and affect all areas of your life. Entering therapy and learning to eliminate or manage your anxiety can change your life.

Today, anxiety affects a staggering percentage of American adults and teenagers. The intense feelings can come on without warning and be triggered by many things. Even when you’re living in a place like Oahu, which most people consider a tropical paradise, there’s no hiding from anxiety.

Unlike medications that may only mask symptoms, CBT can address the root causes of your anxiety and help you overcome them permanently.

At Wellness Counseling, we strive to provide the best cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety Honolulu has available. Our client-centered approach and credentialed therapists assure you of a beneficial treatment experience. Improving your emotional well-being for the long haul is our goal.

How Does CBT Help with Anxiety?

CBT treatment for anxiety disorders begins by focusing on cognitive distortions that cause your feelings of anxiety. Some common cognitive distortions that can trigger feelings of anxiety include:

• Example #1: Catastrophizing your thoughts. You think a pilot’s announcement about turbulence during an airplane flight will lead to a crash – worst-case scenario thinking.
• Example #2: You take a single negative experience and expect similar things to turn out that way every time — I wasn’t able to pass a test; I’ll never be able to pass any tests.

After addressing your unhelpful thinking, our therapists following CBT methods will move on to learned behavior patterns. This includes addressing any unhelpful patterns of behavior such as avoidance and procrastination that, which can also contribute to increase feelings of anxiety.

Once everything is identified and understood, your therapy sessions will teach you how to calm your body and mind when faced with anxiety-producing triggers.

Why Should I Choose CBT
Over Other Options?

The goal of CBT for anxiety disorders is to replace unhelpful thinking with more realistic thoughts. Decades of experience and research have proven that CBT is a highly effective treatment. Our therapists take a holistic approach to help you overcome panic attacks and all other anxious feelings.

The excellent results achieved with therapy to treat anxiety coincide with success in treating other mental health conditions such as depression, alcohol, and drug use problems, marital and relationship problems, eating disorders, etc.

If you’ve tried psychiatric medications and continue to experience symptoms, strongly consider trying CBT. When you’re matched with the right Wellness Counseling Therapist, you’ll be on your way to overcoming your anxiety.

Therapy Sessions for Anxiety:
What Can I Expect?

CBT is a treatment approach that targets unhelpful thoughts and learned patterns of behavior that are causing your anxiety. Therefore, therapy for CBT will likely focus on …

• Addressing your current symptoms
• Identifying what makes you feel anxious or fearful
• Identifying unhelpful behavior patterns
• Learning new coping skills

Creating a safe, supportive, confidential space to work through your anxiety issues is essential and something our counselors do as a first step. Whether you attend in-person sessions or by online telehealth appointment, it works the same.

You’ll begin by working on easing your immediate symptoms and then move on to exploring and understanding their causes. In subsequent sessions, you’ll work on learning new coping skills and replacing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors with positive ones.

Conclusion – Treating Your Anxiety with CBT

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an effective, “gold-standard” treatment for anxiety or any stress-related disorder. It provides short and long-term relief and can help you overcome your fears permanently.

What’s most important is working with a therapist to determine your needs and follow the prescribed treatment plan. It’s a collaborative effort, including the interventions and skills that are most effective for you.

To find out if therapy to treat anxiety is a good fit for you, contact us at Wellness Counseling Center in Honolulu to be matched with a therapist. Together, you’ll agree on a personalized treatment plan that is most effective for you.