Managing anxiety – how counselling can help

Anxiety is ongoing stress in your life that you don't feel you can alleviate or manage effectively. It can help you to learn and understand this within your own situation so that you can make informed decisions about your future options and actions.

Counselling will help you talk things through and get ideas, thoughts and feelings in order and at a more manageable level so you can make those informed choices that will enhance your life and improve your current circumstances.

It can also help you:

• Understand the physiology of stress and learn how you can manage it to reduce the discomfort it brings. 
• Recognise that some level of stress can be necessary and positive when it drives and motivates you to take action.
• Manage your 'stress' so it stays manageable and doesn't tip into negative, unhealthy and ongoing stress that becomes anxiety.

Just being heard and listened to, taken seriously and understood, can really help you to feel better. The one thing people really need to feel good is to feel heard – even when the other person may not agree with your perspective or viewpoint, they do at least 'hear' what you are saying to them.

This is important in all relationships. Not feeling dismissed, diminished, manipulated or undermined means you have been heard and accepted, and have had your views respected and maybe even understood by the other person.

It matters to us that we do have a voice, options, choices and freedom of choice in actions and circumstances. If not we find it stressful!

The definition of stress is 'being unable to meet the demands placed on you'. This may be demands from outside, other people or situations, or from your own misguided expectations of what you 'should' be like, 'ought to be doing' or need to do in order to 'like yourself'. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe you are enough without that extra push and pressure?

Counselling will help you to change those thoughts, realise where they came from and why, and that perhaps, right now, they no longer serve their original purpose in your life.

The past matters in that once you 'know' why, then you can change the present and future for yourself, sometimes with small, easy tweaks that you didn't even know you could do.

The support of a counsellor, focussing on your needs and goals, means you can openly look at your options and perceptions to make changes for a better personal future for yourself. This can also enhance the lives of others around you.

Stress is uncomfortable, we know, but that is to drive you to make the necessary changes to make your life better, healthier and happier – for you.

So consider what is happening for you, when things changed or started to change and what you have been doing to manage things to date. Then look at what you can do going forward to make positive, healthy changes in your life and the circumstances that will help you find contentment, inner peace and even that all-elusive 'happiness'.