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As humans, feeling anxious is normal from time to time. Some signs that one may need to seek therapy for anxiety include symptoms of feeling overwhelmed, irritability, restlessness, struggle to maintain or build relationships, heart palpitations, and fatigue. If you notice that any one of these signs is getting in the way of your basic lifestyle, it is important to reach out and talk to a professional for help and guidance.

• Anxiety is the body’s reaction to any actual or perceived danger. It is a natural feeling that every human feels from time to time. If your anxious symptoms are getting in the way of your day-to-day life, creating difficulty to manage or focus on tasks, it is vital to use coping strategies to take control of the situation.
• Some of the best strategies for managing anxiety include deep breathing, exercise, grounding techniques, mindfulness, and connecting with others. Breathing practices can help slow your heart rate, which should help you calm down. Exercise can also help calm your mind and boost your mood, such as walking or doing yoga. Grounding techniques involve being aware of the present to disrupt future oriented anxious thinking. Mindfulness is a form of relaxation that allows you to stay engaged with your actions and bring your attention back to where you are. Some forms of mindfulness include meditation and body scan.
• In some cases, anxiety can make one isolate themselves from the world and people around them. Connecting with others for support can help one feel less alone. For example, try contacting friends, family, or a therapist.

Burnout, chronic stress, and emotional exhaustion can come in different forms and to all individuals undergoing work-related, personal, social, physical, or mental stress. Burnout is often associated with compassion fatigue and moral stress. Oftentimes, burnout occurs when work stress is combined with additional stressors that exceed the ability to cope, further resulting in mental and physical distress. The results of poor coping with burnout and chronic stress can lead to worsened symptoms as well as addiction, depression, and more. Stress and burnout have become increasingly common around the world. Treatment for chronic stress and burnout involves multi-faceted approaches such as CBT strategies, lifestyle adjustments, mindfulness, emotion-regulation practices, and a strong support system. Making that first step to seek help and support is crucial to getting on the right path to further alleviate and address such factors and symptoms of stress and burnout.

CBT is an evidence-based psychological treatment that is proven to be effective in the treatment of a variety of problems including anxiety, depression, relationship concerns, substance use problems, mental illness and eating disorders.

CBT’s core principles include viewing psychological problems as a result of unhelpful thinking patterns and learned behavior. The cognitive aspect of treatment involves identifying unhelpful thinking patterns and restructuring thoughts into more adaptive thinking. The behavioral aspects include strategies to change behavior and improve coping skills.

Clients can expect to learn new skills that can be practiced in everyday life to help challenge and change their negative thinking and problematic behavior and emotions.

The CBT therapist can help the client explore and monitor their thoughts so they can learn how their thoughts drive their emotions and behavior.  Clients learn to identify various types of distortions in thinking that contribute to depression and anxiety in order to replace negative thoughts with more constructive thoughts. Changing negative thoughts to more accurate and balanced thinking can help reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression and improve mood and outlook on life.

CBT treatment for OCD involves a combination of cognitive restructuring with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). This consists of providing psychoeducation to the client about communication problems between the front part of the brain and the deeper parts. In OCD, the brain provides false information and sends a “danger” signal, which elicits the obsession or compulsion as a protective response. The only way to change how the brain functions is to practice doing something different.  By slowly introducing the person with OCD with the situations or objects that trigger their compulsions and obsessions and teaching the client to delay their response to the trigger, clients can gain a sense of control.  Through the exposure, clients learn that the messages they are receiving that are contributing to the obsession and compulsion are incorrect. ERP can assist clients to better cope with their anxiety understanding that they are experiencing sensations which are not dangerous, which allows them to challenge the accuracy of their thoughts contributing to OCD. It is important to note that the treatment of OCD is paced in accordance with the client’s goals.