Everyone experiences feelings of anxiety from time to time. For many people, those feelings have a clear source and resolve on their own after a short period of time. For those with anxiety disorders, though, feelings of worry, dread, fear, and uncertainty are so persistent and overwhelming that they start to affect quality of life.
Finding the right anxiety treatment is the key to providing proper care for your patients. Brush up on popular therapies and techniques with these common treatment options for patients with anxiety.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is one of the most effective and well-known forms of psychotherapy. Through CBT, therapists teach their patients crucial skills like mindfulness, emotional regulation, and problem-solving abilities. With these skills, patients can learn to recognize and understand negative thoughts and emotions. This mental clarity improves stress management and mental resilience. All of these benefits help patients manage distressing thoughts and other symptoms of anxiety so they can create healthier stress responses and face their anxiety with greater confidence and positivity.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy combines CBT’s practices of sorting through thoughts and feelings calmly and objectively with mindfulness techniques—including meditation, mindfulness stretching, and breathing exercises. As a result, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy helps patients recognize their negative thoughts and emotions, then disengage from them. This helps build the habit of shutting down maladaptive thought patterns and replacing them with more productive thoughts and actions.
Psychodynamic Therapy
In many cases, anxiety stems from underlying issues, such as past trauma or hardship. By working to understand these past experiences, you and your patient can uncover the root of the emotional and behavioral patterns that are at the heart of their anxiety and its symptoms.
As one of the common treatment options for anxiety patients, psychodynamic therapy does just that. This form of talk therapy involves exploring a patient’s thoughts, feelings, and problems to better understand the unconscious patterns beneath unhealthy behaviors. Psychodynamic therapy helps patients understand the source of their anxiety, which gives them a solid foundation to make healthy, informed, and positive changes in their lives.
