Hi everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I'm going to be talking about doom scrolling and this is a term that refers to scrolling through social media or any sort of news feed in which we sort of go down the rabbit hole of consuming negative information. And this inevitably elicits a sense of doom or dread or just a general sense of negativity about the state of the world. So it's definitely not a new concept. And especially now, you know, there's no shortage of negative news that we can be exposed to, but beyond knowing that it makes us feel awful.

Hi everyone. I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist. And in this video I'm going to be sharing a technique called TIPP. And this is taken from dialectical behavior therapy also known as DBT. And it's a really quick and effective way of calming down your emotions. If you're feeling just completely emotionally overwhelmed or dis regulated so the t. Stands for temperature.

And um if you saw my video last week I thought I talked a little bit about vagus nerve icing. And this is essentially the first step in tips. So you want to expose your body to extreme cold and bring down your body temperature which is going to slow your heart rate and send a signal to your brain that it's time to slow everything down and and activate that dive response that I mentioned in last week's video.

Hi everyone, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about the vagus nerve. So this is a nerve that goes from our brains um and connects to several different areas of our bodies. And there's something called vagus nerve icing. That's a technique that has been around for a while and is really effective at um sort of alleviating anxiety in the moment.

Anxiety. We all have it from time to time. And, according to the ADAA, anxiety is the most common mental illness in America. But when is it time to see a professional therapist to help us cope with our anxiety?

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist and I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrated um today's video is going to be a follow up of how to survive the holidays. So last week I shared a few tips and this will be part two. I know we have some more holidays coming up in December and January, which can be very stressful or triggering for a lot of people.

So my first tip is to let go of expectations. I think a lot of times we enter into a situation and this doesn't just apply to holidays. This can be any situation. Um, and we have certain expectations about how something is going to go, what, be it positive or negative and that really kind of um does us a disservice because ultimately we, we don't have a crystal ball, we can't predict the future.

Our lives are filled with a series of events; one after another. Blissful events, tragic events, and everything in between. When those tragic events happen – those knock us flat on our back events – it’s natural to feel lost. To be lost. Grief and feelings of helplessness are part of being human.

Hi everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and this video is going to be a little bit outside the box because I want to talk about how to handle the holidays with family. We have thanksgiving upon us and a lot of us are going to be spending time with family over the next several days, so just wanted to talk about some, some techniques or or coping mechanisms for making it through the holidays.

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I want to talk about how to change a behavior or habit and this can be either the removal of something or the implementation of something. So for example, if we're talking about removal, I have a client who drinks a lot of coffee and wants to start reducing the amount of caffeine he consumes each day until he no longer consumes caffeine at all. So that would be the removal of something.

Hi everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I want to talk about motivation. This is a topic that um I was actually teaching about earlier this week with my theories of personality class. And as I was going through the content with the students, it really dawned on me that this is a topic that applies to a lot of the clients I work with and especially those who tend to be more perfectionistic or have a fear of failure.

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I want to talk about alcohol. Um this video was actually prompted by a session I had with a client yesterday. In addition to a couple articles I read in the news this morning about alcohol consumption before, during and after the pandemic, um which was pretty interesting.

So when they studied the people in the age group of 20-49, they actually found that alcohol was responsible for one in five deaths. And that drink king was a pandemic habit that most people wanted to kick. Like if there was one habit they could choose that they acquired during the pandemic it was drinking.

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about the acronym FEAR. So we all know fear as a basic human emotion, you know, it's necessary for survival and everybody experiences it, but in the psychology world we like to use it as an acronym for false evidence appearing real. So when we experience anxiety a lot of times, we are um making assumptions about how the future is going to be right, and so we're not basing anything off of real evidence that we have, but rather we're sort of creating this narrative of fear and despair based on maybe one little fact that we know or or one little symptom, the best example I can think of for this is, and I'm sure everyone has done this at some point, but you know, you experience some physical symptom and all of a sudden you're on google and WebMD, looking up your symptoms and next thing, you know, you're diagnosing yourself with some terminal illness, right?

What’s the difference between being depressed and being burnt out? How can you tell and does it even matter?