Mental health conditions, such as anxiety, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Every day, more people are giving in to anxiety, especially during the current pandemic going on. This is because many people feel lonely and anxious as the world is coming to a halt and people are quarantining away from their friends and family. This, in turn, leads to the majority of them to seek anxiety counseling for mental health.
Counseling during turbulent times or for an anxious person is crucial because it breaks your negative and destructive thought patterns. It also allows you to make better and informed decisions. So, to make you better informed on the benefits that counseling has on someone with anxiety, we’ve compiled a list of ways on how it’ll help people who are struggling with the condition.
Here are five reasons why you need counseling when you’re trying to combat and manage anxiety:
- Help You Understand Your Problem
Although mental health awareness has been steadily increasing in recent times, there are still many people who remain largely unaware of it. This is because they fail to properly understand and acknowledge the feelings of their loved ones who are struggling with a mental health condition.
This lack of acceptance and understanding can cause the person who’s struggling with mental health problems to feel incredibly isolated and helpless. This leads to the feeling of being dismissed or being treated trivially, which causes them more anxiety since they feel like they’re responsible for what they’re feeling and that nobody can truly comprehend the depth of their emotions.
This is where anxiety counseling for mental health becomes a solution since the individual finally feels like they’re being understood. The counselor will also suggest solutions that prove to help find relief. It’s because talking to a counselor can be immensely helpful because you finally get to have a conversation with someone who understands how you feel, which is hugely relieving for someone with anxiety.
- Help You Face Challenges and Overcome Them
A lot of times, an individual struggles with anxiety because of an internal fear of facing a challenge or accepting a fact that has appeared in their life.
In times like this, advice or encouragement that’s given by loved ones is not enough because people with anxiety often feel that they’re not good enough to accomplish anything in life.
However, counseling can prove to be very helpful for such people. It’s because the counselor helps the individual build self-esteem by making them believe that they’re capable and competent individuals.
This works especially well because the advice is coming from an external person with no ulterior motives. That is why people with anxiety will likely accept these statements and start their journey towards a better life.
Counseling is may also be one of the solutions for people who live under the tragic circumstances of not having any close friends and family to help support them. Such people will often feel a low sense of self-worth because of their loneliness and anxiety. When such patients visit a counselor, they’ll receive support and the strength to carry on with their lives and face their problems.
- Helps You Change Your Toxic or Negative Behavior
Anxiety is often triggered by certain behaviors that a person may engage in. Since their close friends and family members are not experts in distress, they may not be aware of which practices are causing the symptoms of anxiety to occur in the person.
In this case, going to a counselor will be beneficial since they’ll be able to identify the cause of anxiety, and they’ll try fixing that behavior.
Some of the most common causes of anxiety are:
- Avoidance: As mentioned above, people may start suffering from anxiety because they begin to avoid specific problems in their life, which they find too scary to face. These internal stresses and fears can then build up inside the person until they start experiencing feelings of anxiety.
A counselor can help sort out these feelings and give the person the courage they need to face their obstacles, which might help them with their mental health condition.
- Denial: There’s a certain degree to which mental health disorders are stigmatized in society. People who are suffering from such disorders don’t want to be labeled as ‘mentally ill,’ so they start denying that there’s something wrong with them. This often has disastrous consequences as their condition becomes progressively worse to the point where they find it difficult to function normally.
On the other hand, there are people who’ll start showing symptoms of anxiety, but their family and friends force them to suppress these emotions and manage them internally since mental health problems aren’t viewed in a very positive social light.
In both these situations, the result is that a person won’t accept that there’s a problem that needs to be dealt with, leading to the problem worsening over time.
Counseling sessions have proven to be tremendously helpful in solving these issues. This is because the counselor will help a patient gradually understand that they’re not worse off than the rest of the population just because they have their mental health struggles to deal with.
A person going to counseling will slowly learn to modify their behavior and accept that they have a mental health condition, which is nothing to be ashamed of.
- Expectations: Some people are incredibly optimistic, and they hold very lofty expectations about their future. When things don’t turn out as planned, they can often succumb to the shock and enter a permanent state of paranoia and uncertainty. Now, they’ll worry over every little thing that might happen in the future.
Counselors can help such a person heal slowly from their shocked state. They’ll help the individual in setting realistic expectations for the future and also teach them how to respond when things don’t turn out according to their plan.
This is particularly helpful in teaching people who have suffered from a calamity to once again view the future with optimism and hope, not fear and paranoia.
- Reassurance: A self destructive behavior that certain people possess, which makes them more likely to suffer from anxiety, is the constant need for reassurance from others. Such people live off of the validation that their friends and peers give them. They have a very fragile self-image, which is continuously changing according to people’s opinion of them.
Since it’s impossible to please everyone in this world, and since no matter what you do, there will always be people displeased with your actions, assurance seekers live in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and fear that people don’t like them.
Counseling is a remedy for this problem. Counselors help change such people’s behaviors by slowly making them less reliant on external opinions and more on how they define and view themselves. It can teach assurance seekers to be happy with themselves just the way they are. Counselors will also train them to be resilient to other people’s opinions, no matter how negative they are.
- Helplessness: People that are struggling with depression and anxiety tend to feel hopeless and view all future events with negativity.
Anxiety causes people difficulty in carrying out their everyday tasks and achieving their goals, affecting their performance at work. As a result, people with anxiety find it very difficult to be hopeful in believing that something they desire can happen. They think that they’re incapable of accomplishing anything and that no matter what they do, things will turn out bad.
This pessimistic attitude eventually turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy where the patient’s beliefs and attitudes influence how events turn out. Counseling can heal such people by fixing their attitude, hence their behavior. A counselor helps people to overcome their defeatist attitude by first accomplishing small goals that are set by the counselor, giving the person a feeling of victory.
- Counseling Helps You Heal
Often, the number one cause for a person’s anxiety is some past trauma that they experience, which they cannot let go. The highest rates of anxiety and depression occur amongst people who had abusive childhoods.
Victims of abuse and trauma often suffer from anxiety because they’re unable to come to peace with and let go of the pain that they experienced early in their life. Taking regular counseling sessions are highly recommended for people struggling with such problems.
When people speak of the pain that they suffered from, it results in a sort of emotional catharsis where the prolonged repressed feelings of shame and anger are finally released, creating a sense of internal peace.
- Helps You Socialize
A defining feature of people struggling with mental health conditions is the overwhelming feeling of being completely alone and not understood since the conflict is happening inside the brain, and people cannot know how it feels.
Group counseling or therapy sessions are beneficial in this case. When people come face-to-face with individuals who are just like them, a sense of solidarity is created. This gives people a tremendous amount of courage in persevering with their lives.
Key Takeaway
Counseling is a very effective treatment for those struggling with anxiety, and it helps them in a variety of ways. If you’re struggling with anxiety or know anyone who’s facing this problem, don’t hesitate to choose counseling as a treatment option.
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