Anxiety treatment is one of Dr. Clarke’s specialties. Fear is the basic human emotion behind anxiety, and we all feel it at times! When this emotion becomes intense, anxiety can interfere with your life, your relationships, and your basic daily functioning, and you may want to consider therapy. There are many evidence-based treatments (i.e. treatments backed by repeated research studies) that can help you reduce your anxiety symptoms and improve your life.

What are the symptoms of anxiety?

Anxiety can feel different for each person. A person may experience physical anxiety symptoms, psychological anxiety symptoms, or a combination of both. All of these anxiety symptoms can be addressed in therapy.

Examples of physical anxiety symptoms:

• Racing heart

• Stomach issues (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea)

• Sweating (palms, body sweat)

• Difficulty breathing

• Sleep difficulties

Examples of psychological anxiety symptoms:

• Worrying

• Feeling on edge

• Difficulty concentrating and focusing

• Irritability

• Negative thoughts

What are the benefits of therapy for anxiety?

Therapy for anxiety can identify the symptoms, causes, and triggers of anxiety. Therapy for anxiety can also help change unhelpful thought patterns and reduce anxious thoughts and worries. Therapy can allow for a deeper acceptance of the things that are out of our control (which are often the things that cause us anxiety!). Learning new skills in therapy can help you reduce stress and increase your ability to relax.

What is therapy for anxiety? 

Therapy for anxiety will focus on giving you new tools to reduce your anxiety symptoms. Therapy will also include time to talk about your thoughts and feelings that may trigger or worsen anxiety. What we do and how we think can impact how we feel. By talking about your experience with anxiety, we will collaborate and find new ways to look at your life, ways that can help shift how you are thinking and feeling.

Often anxiety is triggered by future events that we have little to no control over. Therapy for anxiety will include learning skills to help with accepting and coping with what we can’t change in our lives while learning new ways to create change in ways that we can.

What treatments for anxiety do you use?

Dr. Clarke takes an integrative approach for treating anxiety. She relies heavily on encouraging clients to incorporate health and wellness tools like exercise, meditation, mindfulness, and breathing exercises. If that is something that you have already tried but it didn’t “stick”, she will understand because change is hard! She will work with you to find why you want to change, and she will problem solve with you and collaborate with you to help you make small, manageable changes towards a bigger goal (using Motivational Interviewing).

Anxiety treatment will also include working on thoughts. Sometimes there are unhelpful thoughts or false beliefs that can be changed to reduce anxiety (using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety, or CBT).  For example, always jumping to the worst case scenario is a thought pattern that can be changed to decrease anxiety. There are thoughts, though, that are true and accurate that can also cause us anxiety. With thoughts like these, increasing acceptance (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for anxiety, or ACT) can help reduce our anxiety.

Anxiety treatment will include learning new skills, too. Dr. Clarke will integrate tools (using Dialectic Behavioral Therapy for anxiety, or DBT) to help increase mindfulness, your ability to interact and relate to people, your ability to tolerate stressful situations, and your comfort with identifying and managing emotions.