Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety is useful in small doses. It gets you to study for the test and check the stove. An anxiety disorder is when worry or fear shows up too often, too strongly, or about things that aren't actually dangerous, and a person starts arranging their life around avoiding it.
Common types
Generalized anxiety disorder. Constant worry about many things, with tension, poor sleep and trouble relaxing.
Social anxiety disorder. Intense fear of being judged or embarrassed around other people.
Panic disorder. Sudden attacks of fear with a racing heart and shortness of breath, and dread of the next one.
Agoraphobia. Avoiding places where escape feels hard, sometimes to the point of not leaving home.
Specific phobias. Fear of a particular thing, like driving, needles or heights.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is now classified separately, but it shares a lot with anxiety and responds to similar treatment, especially exposure and response prevention.
The avoidance trap
Avoiding what scares you brings fast relief, which is exactly why it grows. Skip the grocery store once and it's easier to skip it again. Within a year, someone may only shop at midnight, or not at all.
That is why talking about anxiety in an office often isn't enough. The fear lives in specific places: the highway on-ramp, the break room, the line at the bank. The fastest progress usually happens there.
How Sanare treats anxiety
Sanare clinicians go with clients into the situations that set off their anxiety, at a pace the client agrees to. One visit might be a short drive around the block. A few weeks later, it's the highway. Clients are seen one to five times a week by a team of at least two clinicians.
Exposure therapy. Facing feared situations step by step until they lose their grip.
CBT. Catching and testing anxious predictions as they happen.
Body skills. Breathing and grounding techniques to ride out panic without fleeing.
Rebuilding life. Getting back to work, school, errands and friends that anxiety had taken over.
Some people also take medication for anxiety, prescribed by their own doctor or psychiatrist. We coordinate with them.
What a first month can look like
The first few visits are about understanding the anxiety: what sets it off, what the person avoids, and what that avoidance has cost. Together we build a ladder of feared situations, from mildly uncomfortable to very hard. By the second or third week, most clients are working on the lower rungs out in the world, with their clinician there. Progress usually speeds up once a person sees the fear drop on its own a few times.
More from our blog
We've written about anxiety rehab versus outpatient care and signs that anxiety treatment isn't enough.
Anxiety treatment in Denver
We work with adults across the Denver and Boulder metro. Contact Sanare or call 303.476.1974 to set up a short call.