Effective Anxiety Treatment in
Boulder, CO

Anxiety treatment is available throughout the state via online therapy in Colorado

You feel stressed, worried, overwhelmed, and anxious. Some nights you can’t fall asleep because you’re so worked up.
It’s hard for you to be in the moment and enjoy life because you’re always worried something bad will happen.

Anxiety is one of the most common causes of decreased happiness and loss of satisfaction in our lives. Anxiety is treatable. There’s no need to keep living overwhelmed and unsatisfied.

You may have anxiety if…

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety happens when our brain gets stuck on fight, flight, or freeze mode. It often feels like something is wrong or out of control even when rationally we know we ‘should’ be fine. When we are truly anxious, we are unable to turn off that sense of distress even when we look around and see with our own eyes that there is nothing immediately threatening our well being. Anxiety is exhausting, defeating. Anxiety is like an app’ constantly running in the background, using your energy even when you aren’t paying attention. It quietly drains your energy, leaving you with less energy, creativity, and the ability to have fun or get things done that are important to you.

Common Symptoms of Anxiety:

Anxiety looks different from person to person because as humans, we’re unique. But, people who have an anxiety disorder u usually some or most of these symptoms:

What is a panic attack?

There are quite a few ways to explain a panic attack, but for brevity and clarity, let’s think about it in terms of the nervous system. A panic attack happens when something triggers your brain system into an extreme fight, flight, or freeze mode. That’s why you may have a pounding heart, shortness of breath, or excessive sweating. The animal part of your brain is turned on high and the rational part of our brain is turned down or off. So, your brain begins sending out chemical messages that will help you run from or fight a perceived danger. Your brain fully believes you are experiencing a mortal threat even if you are just picking out bread in the grocery store. This process speeds up your heartbeat, it makes your breathing become shallow and your rational brain (pre­frontal cortex) turns down/off because it’s too slow for that kind of response. If there was actually a threat, this would be a great response because it would help you survive.

But, the problem is that, by definition, a panic attack means that there isn’t actually a threat, but your whole body is behaving as if there is. Panic attacks can happen during high-stress times or they can appear out of the blue.

Common Symptoms of a Panic Attack Include:

If you want to learn more about panic attacks and how to cope with them, Read therapist Gennifer Morely’s article How to have a better panic attack.

“Simply put, effective counseling can help you enjoy your life more. ”

– Gennifer Morely MA LPC

7 Ways our Anxiety Therapists Can Help You During Anxiety Treatment in Boulder, CO

  1. Teach you coping techniques to make the symptoms of anxiety less painful or destructive
  2. Lessen your overall stress and anxiety
  3. Help you increase your ability to prevent anxiety all together
  4. Assist you in understanding the role anxiety plays in your life
  5. Teach you the skills to stop anxiety from negatively impacting your career, relationships, and social life
  6. They give you control and power over stress, worry, and anxiety
  7. Help you feel more relaxed, happier, and at ease.

Anxiety is Destructive and it’s Hard to Change On Your Own

Often when you make choices and draw conclusions when you’re in an anxious state, it’s the fearful and childlike part of your brain that drives your actions. Building the skills to recognize when this portion of your brain is driving choices is important. It can help you remove the fear from the driver’s seat of your life and replace it with empowered adult thinking. In essence, your best self makes your life better, not your fearful self. If you trust yourself and have faith that you can handle things, then you can overcome your struggles. This is a life changer to change your relationship to anxiety

North Boulder Counseling’s Approach to Anxiety Treatment

Our Therapists use an Integrated Approach to Therapy for Anxiety

An integrated approach means that each therapist has specialized training in a variety of therapeutic areas. So, we tailor our counseling approach to meet your unique needs. Often having the option of using multiple types of therapy to treat your anxiety gives us the most powerful and effective outcomes. It also allows our therapists to make sure we have several ways to work with you so we can offer you the most effective anxiety treatment possible. When you come to our counseling clinic you won’t get a cut and dry approach to counseling, you will get specialized high-quality anxiety treatment.

DBT or CBT

CBT: Cognitive Behavioral therapy

DBT: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with Mindfulness

Both DBT and CBT help your therapist understand how your feelings, thoughts, and actions work together. When we understand this, then we can develop a treatment plan to help you cope with your symptoms and prevent anxiety and stress from being such a prominent part of your life.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a simple way of saying being present in the moment. It allows you to focus on getting to know your anxiety better. You often spend so much time trying to avoid our anxiety because it feels uncomfortable, so you really don’t know much about it. All you know is that you don’t like it. When you practice mindfulness and pay attention to your anxious thoughts you will learn a lot of useful information that will help you overcome it. Often the best way to interrupt anxiety is by leaning into it. When you do this, you will learn that your anxious thoughts are not as threatening as you thought. Mindfulness therapists ask things like; what do you feel in your body when you are anxious? How is your breathing, your heartbeat, your vision?

Neurobiology and Anxiety

Your brain takes input from your senses and determines in milliseconds if an event is a threat or not. If it is deemed a threat, your reaction is determined by the fight or flight center part of your brain. Whenever that portion of your brain is employed, access to higher-level thinking is limited. This means: if you are feeling anxious, you are also unlikely to use rationale thinking to stop your anxiety.

EMDR for Anxiety

EMDR is short for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s famous for helping veterans and trauma survivors cope with PTSD. But, it can be very helpful to treat anxiety. Anxiety can be a side effect of trauma or caused by a distressing event or series of events. EMDR can help you remember what happened and acknowledge how sad or hard it was. But, it will lessen the “hold” it has on you. EMDR isn’t magic, but it may be able to help you move through your trauma or anxiety if traditional talk-therapy didn’t work.

“Therapy will help you make more room in your life for the good stuff”

– Gennifer Morley MA LPC

Begin Anxiety Treatment in Boulder, CO

You don’t have to let anxiety keep you from your best life. Therapy for anxiety can give you ways to work with your anxiety so it doesn’t consume you. It can also help you figure out how to have less anxiety so that anxiety doesn’t keep you from living your best life. Ultimately, therapy helps you make more room in your life for the good stuff so that your day-to-day life is more satisfying. To begin counseling in Boulder, CO, follow these steps:

  1. Contact our therapy center
  2. Request an appointment to learn more about our therapists and anxiety treatment
  3. Begin therapy and feel relief from the symptoms of anxiety so you can live your best life and thrive!

Other Services offered at North Boulder Counseling:

Our Boulder, CO counseling center is committed to helping you overcome anxiety so you can live the life you want. Our therapists offer an anxiety treatment intensive program, postpartum anxiety treatment, postpartum depression counseling, perinatal support, counseling for women, parenting coaching,  grief counseling, trauma treatment and EMDR, depression treatment, teen therapy, LGTBQ counseling, young adult counseling, and play therapy. If you’re a clinician looking for professional supervision and consulting or business coaching for therapists, we can help! Furthermore, if you can’t make it to our counseling clinic, we offer online therapy in Colorado to help you overcome your challenges. Contact our counseling clinic today to begin your healing journey towards better mental health!

Which of these best describes you?

1. I don’t stop moving or thinking until I crash.
(I get a lot done *when* I can focus BUT I feel out of control and the crashes can be hard)

2. I worry a lot. If I am honest the majority of my thoughts are some kind of worrying.
(I feel like I’m keeping myself safe and being smart BUT I sometimes miss the good stuff looking for what’s wrong. And worrying so much is exhausting!)

3. I have a very full life, and things look great on the outside. But inside, I know that something’s out of balance.
(I have accomplished a lot that I am proud of BUT I don’t feel like I’m taking care of my well-being. It might be time to reassess my priorities.)

Do any of these feel familiar to you?

WE GET IT...

Your anxiety is frustrating and can even be painful.

The good news is It Only Gets Better From Here

How can Therapy for Anxiety help you?

You can be less anxious, feel more relaxed and experience more satisfaction in your life.