Convenient and affordable therapy for anxiety in Ontario

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is a fear-based reaction to perceived threats. It is your body’s protective response to prepare you for anything that it perceives to be a threat to your experience of safety and survival. Although anxiety and stress both involve your nervous system being in fight-or-flight mode, it’s different from stress in the sense that symptoms persist even without an obvious trigger, or when the perceived threat has come and gone.

What are common anxiety symptoms?

Common anxiety symptoms include:

• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions

• Muscle tension and tightness

• Elevated heart rate or heart palpitations

• Unexpected sweating

• Sleeping and digestive issues

• Persistent worrying and rumination

• Catastrophization: jumping immediately to the worst possible scenario, no matter how unlikely it may be, and worrying excessively about it

• Experiencing a looming sense of danger, doom, or panic

• Hypervigilance: an increased state of alertness

• Fatigue/exhaustion

• Fear of being judged/left behind/abandoned in relationships

What's it like to live with anxiety?

Living with anxiety can feel like never or rarely being able to let your guard down, which is an exhausting experience and literally weighs down your nervous system. Since your brain is constantly scanning for signs of danger and your nervous system is consistently activated, your emotional, mental, and energy capacity is often decreased, making it more difficult to concentrate, be present in the moment, or act like your authentic self.

There’s often conflict between logical reasoning and uncontrollable behaviours and worries: what you know to be true and what you feel like is true and what you can’t help but do. Here are some examples of anxious thoughts can sound like:

• “I know I shouldn’t care about what my friends/colleagues think of me, but I can’t help but worry that they all think badly of me and I can’t stop overly trying to get them to like me.”

• “I know the chances of me completely failing all of my classes and never finding a job are pretty low, but I can't stop worrying about what if? And then I get so overwhelmed that I can’t actually study.”

• “I don’t even know what I’m scared of, I just know that I can’t calm down and random scenarios keep running through my head.”

What type of therapy is best for anxiety?

If you resonate with the anxiety symptoms described above, don’t worry- you’re not alone. Anxiety is a common issue in many societies, including ours, and can be treated with multiple forms of therapy.

Treatments like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), mindfulness practices, and Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) can help with regulating and managing anxiety symptoms by giving you clarity over your brain’s and body’s reactionary patterns and giving you important self-regulation tools. Therapies like attachment-based therapy, trauma-informed and culturally-responsive approaches, and Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) can help to bring a deeper level of understanding and healing to your experience of anxiety by looking at how your childhood, early experiences, and upbringing, as well as societal and systemic influences may have contributed to your current issues. IFS, along with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) are also trauma processing therapies that can help with not only emotion regulation, but also reprocessing and healing past traumatic experiences that are at the root of your fears, potentially leading to experiencing less triggers or less strongly to triggers.

If you aren’t sure which therapy is the best for you to start with, our team of therapists are here to guide you. We all practice from an integrative perspective to treat anxiety, which means that your therapist will work with you to understand your unique situation, guide you on which treatment or combination of treatments are best suited for you, and work with you on an individualized treatment plan.

What does therapy for anxiety look like?

Your therapist will work with you on an individualized treatment plan, but at a high level, therapy for anxiety will typically involve the following:

• Information gathering to better understand your unique experiences, including identifying your triggers, reaction patterns, and important influencing and perpetuating factors

• Emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills training

• Real-life practice for the skills you’re learning outside of the therapy sessions

• Optimizing and building your regulation “tool box” while monitoring changes to symptoms

• Trauma reprocessing work (for those who want to go deeper)

How long does anxiety take to treat?

Depending on your therapy goals and level of need, treatments can take between 5 to 10+ sessions, with more sessions for those who have higher levels of need and/or want to go deeper in their healing journeys.

Regardless of which treatment you start with, seeking therapy for anxiety can help you to regain control and freedom from your symptoms. Build momentum in your healing journey and take that first step by scheduling a free initial consultation with a therapist on our team, or reach out to our Intake Coordinator to be matched with a suitable therapist.