CBT for Anxiety: Learning How to Identify, Challenge, and Modify Negative Patterns

Are you experiencing trouble sleeping, excessive worry you can’t seem to shake, intrusive thoughts, and physical symptoms like muscle tension and alarming heart palpitations?

Or perhaps your child or teen is having problems focusing, withdrawing from friends and activities, or letting their grades slip?

It may surprise you that both of these sets of symptoms qualify as signs of anxiety — a mental health condition that affects 40  million adults and nearly 32% of adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18. In fact, anxiety is the most frequently diagnosed mental health condition. 

The good news is that anxiety is highly treatable using a variety of treatment modalities, and the caring provider team at Clarity Psychiatric Care has experience helping people of all ages living with the effects of anxiety. 

Seeking treatment is important because when anxiety symptoms are eased, life becomes much more manageable and enjoyable. 

One of the most common and effective anxiety treatments is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Here, we explain how it can help you and just what it involves.

Anxiety manifests in many ways

Generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and social anxiety are some types of anxiety. 

In addition to the symptoms we noted above, here are additional signs that point to an anxiety disorder:

• Appetite shifts
• Irritability
• Feeling restless and unsettled
• Sweating
• Intense concern about health, your job, school, or another major part of your life
• Shortness of breath
• Stomach upset
• Insomnia

Anxiety disorder can be traced to genetic factors, chemical imbalances, and environmental factors like growing up in a very stressful or neglectful household. 

Brain changes can account for anxiety as well. For example, when something changes in the part of your brain that manages anxiety and fear, it can lead to an uptick in anxiety.

What is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and how can it address anxiety?

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a type of talk therapy that centers on goals that your Clarity Psychiatric Care provider and you or your child establish to help manage the anxiety and relieve its symptoms.

The concepts of CBT include:

• Unhelpful thinking patterns contribute to anxiety
• Problematic learned behaviors increase anxiety
• Anxiety is based on flawed beliefs and thoughts about oneself and the world
• It’s possible to learn healthier ways to cope with anxiety

When you engage in CBT for anxiety, we help you to carefully analyze and discuss your thoughts and feelings with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how your thoughts influence your behavior. 

This type of therapy emphasizes assessing your life and coping mechanisms today, rather than delving deeply into your past history.

CBT helps you unlearn negative thoughts, shift unhealthy thinking patterns, and adjust your self-perception and relationships with others. You’ll learn to replace them with better, more realistic ones. 

This orientation shift helps you see things more clearly and improves how you respond to stressful situations and concerns.  

In essence, therapist-guided CBT can help you target the thought patterns that feed your anxiety, question them, and change how you respond. During therapy, you might role-play with your therapist, gain strategies that help you face and learn to tolerate your fears as opposed to avoiding them, and adopt techniques that calm your mind and relax your body. 

This involves:

• Reframing how you think about problems and challenges
• Guided discovery, where your therapist challenges some of your assumptions
• Exposure therapy, where you learn gradually to be able to sit with worry and cope with it
• Behavioral experiments that help you understand and reduce catastrophic thinking
• Stress reduction techniques like deep breathing and imagery help lower anxiety
• Breaking often-avoided tasks into smaller, more manageable micro-tasks

CBT can also be prescribed in combination with other treatments, such as prescription medication. 

If anxiety is getting in the way of how you or your child is functioning, please reach out to us. You can schedule an appointment by calling our Cherry Hill office at 856-428-1260 or book one online.