Anxiety Cures – What Are The Available Options
From medications to psychotherapy, from alternative medicine to lifestyle modifications and self-help strategies, there is a wide range of options when it comes to treating anxiety disorder. These so-called anxiety cures all try to do one thing – reduce the symptoms of anxiety disorder and eventually eliminate the condition.
Therapies
The first line of treatment for anxiety disorder is often composed psychotherapeutic tools.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a psychotherapeutic tool, is a key component of most anxiety treatment. This therapy uses techniques that first examine the distortion in the thinking pattern of an individual. Once the pattern that causes the chronic anxiety to happen is identified, it is corrected and replaced with healthier, more appropriate thinking patterns. The basic premise of this therapy is that thoughts – not actual events – are responsible for the way people behave. If perceptions or thoughts are correct and appropriate, it follows that the behavior is appropriate.
Education, monitoring, physical control strategies, cognitive control strategies and behavioral strategies are the five components that make up this therapy. All these components try to help an individual acquire a much healthier understanding of the condition while allowing him to form coping strategies that work to eliminate the symptoms of anxiety.
Exposure Therapy
It is human nature to avoid things and situations they are afraid of. This therapy tries to alter that.
As its name suggests, ‘exposure therapy’ works by exposing the person systematically to his object of fear. The principle is that with repeated exposures, fear diminishes and eventually dies. The person then gains an increasing sense of control over the situation and what used to cause his levels of anxiety will end up becoming an ordinary thing or situation.
Exposure therapy comes in two approaches. The first approach happens mostly in the mind of the patient. In this approach, the patient imagines his object of fear and respond to it as he would in real life. The second approach, the more direct approach, actually forces the individual to confront his object of fear in real life.
Whileboth cognitive and behavioral therapy and exposure therapy are effective by themselves, most clinicians combine them to bring about faster relief from the symptoms of anxiety disorder.
Medications
Medications are, by design, most effective when used for providing quick relief in case of panic attacks. Because of their side effects, physicians generally try to limit the use of medications for treatment of anxiety. This is not to say that medications for anxiety are not effective though, they are.
The 3 major classes of medications for anxiety are:
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs) Benzodiazpines
For faster results, doctors often combine psychotherapy and medications as anxiety cures. To know more about your options, seek the professional medical advice of your physician.
You have a lot of for anxiety cures. To determine whether a type of drug, therapy or self-help strategy will work for you, it is recommendable that you talk to your physician.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
