6 Signs it's Time to See a Therapist for Your Anxiety - Video Transcript

Hey, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about six signs that it might be time to see a therapist for your anxiety. Now, anxiety itself is a very normal emotion. It's something all humans and animals experience because it's our fight-flight or freeze response. So it can help to keep us safe.

It's useful in terms of staying motivated or focused, but sometimes it can reach a point at which it starts to impair our daily functioning and that's when it becomes problematic. So um the first indicator that it might be time to seek out some outside professional help is if you're constantly feeling overwhelmed, you know, all of us feel stressed and overwhelmed on occasion, but if you feel like it's just unrelenting um that can be sort of a red flag in addition to constantly expecting the worst. Um this is also known as catastrophizing and this is like if you have something coming up in the future that you're anticipating your mind automatically goes to the negative and expects the worst-case scenario.

Another indicator is our physical symptoms. So this can include g. I. Issues, nausea, headaches, unexplained muscle pain, or tension things along those lines. And often times we have these physical symptoms and we don't even make the connection that they can be caused by anxiety.

So that's just something to kind of look out for. Um if your emotions feel more intense and that it's kind of harder to cope with them or come down from that heightened emotional state. That can be another indicator. This does also include anger and irritability. Um that can be a way that anxiety shows up in people, that a lot of people aren't aware of.

Another indicator is a decline in academic or work performance, so sometimes there might be a degree of apathy or just kind of loss of interest, um you know, you feel kind of depleted of energy that you can't really um give it your all in terms of school or work, the 5th 1 is turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

So I know this has become a lot more common over the pandemic because we have been sort of limited in what we can do. So people have turned to alcohol drugs um overeating things like that to sort of numb out their emotions. And then lastly, um if you find that you have more conflict or are withdrawing from relationships, that can actually be an indicator too, so it's really important um with anxiety that we maintain a support system. If you feel yourself kind of getting into little tiffs with the people in your life or just wanting to spend more time alone, um then that can also be an indicator that your anxiety has sort of um surpassed that that threshold, so please feel free to reach out with any questions or drop a comment um if you have any insights or questions or your own experiences with anxiety and um I look forward to seeing you guys next week take care.

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