Most therapist Orange County offices will start the process of stress management by finding the origin of the problem, through the use of simple interviews and consultations. In some cases, such as marital difficulties, the patient may be referred to a marriage counseling Orange County expert, but the majority of patients will be able to benefit from direct cognitive therapy that addresses how the person responds to problematic situations. By understanding a patient’s usual coping behaviors and which individual situations cause high levels of stress, a professional therapist will be able to improve the person’s response to these situations and provide advice about how to reduce or manage stressful events.

In addition to cognitive therapy by a trained professional, there are also ways that a person can change their own behavior as part of a stress management plan. The old adage that you are what you eat is certainly true and one change that can make a major difference is addressing a poor diet. Cutting out high fat content foods as well as lowering refined sugar will help change the highs and lows of a rapidly changing blood sugar level. In addition, setting aside time for exercise and relaxation will help to balance the patient’s life and better prepare them for stressful situations that may lie ahead.

Depressive disorders are often not easy to recognize or classify and a person that has one or more of the conditions that are grouped under the umbrella term of depression may live for several years without knowing that they should look through therapist Orange County listings to find a trained care provider. Because depressive disorders frequently go undetected for years, the failure to get help early can result in a long and arduous recovery from the condition. Specific forms of depression, such as Major Depressive Disorder, could put a person at a high risk of suicide or lower their internal motivation to a point where they are no longer able to live a productive life.

The good side of depression and depressive disorders is that they are treatable. Much study has been done about the best treatment plans and a professional Huntington Beach Therapist will be able to complete a thorough diagnosis of the condition and advise many options to a person struggling with depression. An accurate diagnosis is the key to getting the right treatment for depression. A person that is depressed due to relationship problems may be referred to a marriage counseling Orange County specialist. In the same vein, a woman who is dealing with postpartum depression will need to see a therapist that has experience dealing with this specific disorder. With many qualified professionals in the area, a person living with depression should be able to find relief.

In general, anxiety can come from any direction – problems at work, financial burdens, and relationship issues are just a few common examples. When worries like these start to invade a person’s thoughts at all times, it could be reaching excessive levels. The person will usually show some mental symptoms, such as being unable to concentrate on tasks or constantly having a feeling of dread at what will happen in the future. In addition, too much anxiety can also be manifested with physical symptoms as well. A person may have stomach problems, muscle tension, or be restless and unable to fall asleep as a result of the anxiety.

For a person living with excessive anxiety, the constant feelings of worry, fear, and angst can take their toll – impairing the ability to function properly in real world situations and enjoy a productive life. Those that have recognized their levels of anxiety as being abnormal should consider how an Orange County Therapy office may be able to help. General anxiety and marriage counseling Orange County options are often located just minutes away and can provide a full management plan that includes cognitive behavioral therapy as well as possible medication solutions. A visit to a Huntington Beach Therapist like Carl Wells may make the difference between struggling with anxiety or effectively dealing with the issue.

1. When you are feeling ‘normal’, meaning you are doing reasonably well with manageable feelings and being able to perform reasonably well chances are you are influenced by beliefs such as: “If I am having difficulty with this task, then this is often the human experience and I am often able to work through this most of the time. 

2. However, what are likely to experience while you are believing " if I am having trouble accomplishing this situation then it means I am doomed, crazy,or  inferior”?   Which set of these “if—then” beliefs will create the best results?  You need to learn how you sabotage yourself “for ‘good’ reasons” by the set of negative beliefs and to keep a log about how you think when you feel normal and the opposite. 

3. Do you have beliefs that it’s in your DNA that you are more dysfunctional and have very negative emotions which might spiral into disability or social rejection?  Many of your beliefs are habits you learned unwittingly, maybe when you were young and these thoughts served to make the ‘best’ of what was going on, but you learned newer beliefs as you grew older.  If you strongly believe things are hopeless then you need to work on this, possibly with a therapist.

I suggest you keep an ‘if……..then‘ log each day to see if you can ‘catch’ yourself  creating evaluations, mostly spontaneously, and often without your conscious knowledge, that are likely to maintain states of anxiety or depression or feeling ‘ok’.  If you feel anxious look for: "If I can’t follow through with these tasks, then I’m going to have something very bad happen." If you feel depressed, the prediction might be: "If I can’t complete this assignment then it means I’m worthless and doomed.

I have purposely taken the extremes of the beliefs you have and you might not be aware of that much negativity but you will notice that at the times you feel really down and out, compared to those you feel ‘ok’ your beliefs are quite different.

I welcome your comments or questions about your own experiences.
 

I am a licensed therapist in Orange County, servicing Huntington Beach and area. My services include anxiety therapy and depression treatment.

How might you be keeping yourself from happiness from avoiding painful emotions?

You could be hitting the wall that you can break though.

• The greatest problem I see in my private practice is people like you trying to escape from painful emotions. Read on to learn about a couple of examples of people I treated who were stopped in their tracks from recovery.
• A woman and a man just like you were immobilized because they formed a bad habit, by: trying to block out very painful emotions. They numbed themselves and created lots of pain and fatigue from trying to block out emotional pain. They couldn’t regulate their sleep cycles and zoned out losing several hours of consciousness.
• Do you often distract yourself and block out severe emotional pain because you are afraid you’ll get worse and let yourself believe experiencing the pain will be useless?
• Don’t let yourself be defeated by the fear of painful emotions because with help you can learn to achieve peace by finding solutions from these emotions.
• Facing these powerful and scary emotions is, surprisingly, the way home.
• How can you find out how to fight your depression or anxiety if you don’t allow yourself to experience the emotions and find out the thoughts or memories maintaining the pain?
• You have within you the ability to recovery with tools you can learn if you are willing to let yourself experience the pain and discovering much more about the distorted deep beliefs and pessimistic thoughts you might not even be aware of..
• Pasting happy thoughts in your mind without knowing what your deeply held negative experiences are hasn’t helped you yet, so what are you waiting for?

I am a licensed and experienced therapist in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with hundreds of clients to help them overcome the challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. To get started, contact me at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490.

1. Learn to recognize and record your emotions.  

Emotions (or feelings) are usually one-word descriptions such as sad, hopeless, helpless, defeated, or worthless. Do you draw a blank when trying to write them down?  You might have learned to block out recognizing them due to pain or being afraid of these feelings. It is often helpful, too to record thoughts you are having.

2. Spend time attempting to accomplish assignments your therapist might give you even though you feel helpless to accomplish them.

For example, if asked to keep a record of your emotions and you draw a blank, there are good reasons! This is difficult, but don’t give up. Many people lack confidence when depressed!  You are not alone. If you feel unable to do something that might eventually help you. This information about your difficulty can be very helpful to me to help you no matter what happens.

3. Know that worry about keeping your thoughts and feelings secret from others is common.

You might have strong fears about others finding out about your depressive thoughts, even people close to you. I have worked with lots of people who avoided counseling for a long time because they felt ashamed or afraid of others finding out what was going on inside. Rest assumed that your information will be kept in strict confidence.

4. Even if you don’t have a clear idea how counseling might help, come in or talk to me on the phone.

Patients have told me that when someone referred them to me they didn’t know how depression treatment might help but soon learned that it could help. You might feel as if you are in a fog at this moment but things will clear up.

I am a licensed and experienced therapist in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with hundreds of clients to help them overcome the challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. To get started, contact me at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490.

Would you like to read articles here that specifically help you with unique solutions that can help you to start freeing yourself from anxiety or depression?   All you need to do is to take a look at this site and make a confidential comment about 3 problems you would like to improve right now — examples: how to relax, free yourself from painful emotions, or improve relationships.  Just write down now what 3 emotional situations you would like to solve and see if you can find some answers in articles I have already written.

Then, leave a comment about these problems and what you would like to see on this site and you will get a prompt reply.

I am a licensed and experienced anxiety and depression therapist in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with many clients to help them overcome the challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free half hour phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. Find out more at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490 for more information.

Considering couples counseling? Unsure who to choose or how to evaluate your fit with a couples counselor? As a couples counselor myself, I believe that experience and Chemistry are the best guides for trying out a counselor. You can verify experience by searching for how long a counselor has been licensed and you can partially evaluate how you feel with a counselor who gives a free phone consultation and read the articles on their web site. Whoever you decided to try, then you can gauge for yourself the worth of the sessions by the results you get.

I am a licensed and experienced couples counselor in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with many clients to help them overcome the challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free half hour phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. Find out more at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490 for more information.

A disorder is a more serious mental or emotional problem which significantly interferes with major life skills such as work and relationships and can only be diagnosed by a licensed mental health specialist. Simply feeling anxiety (nervousness, fear) is a normal and universal experience that can be brief but might provide painful discomfort. Following are some common types of anxiety disorders.

What is the Most Common Anxiety Disorder?

Generalized Anxiety Disorder  (GAD) is the most common type and involves worry about more than one type of situation.  People diagnosed with the disorder are habitual chronic worriers that continue to worry even about common problems that most people don’t worry about. They have strong beliefs that worry is necessary to prevent problems and often also believe worry is dangerous to mental health.

What is a Panic Disorder?

Panic disorder involves having dread about repeating episodes of  intense anxiety, often called ‘attacks’, in which a variety of fearful symptoms occur such as shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, sweat not brought on by heat, muscle tension and rapid breathing. 

Common fears include dying or being out of mental control and often suffers fear public embarrassment when experiencing these symptoms.  Panic episodes (or ‘attacks’ are fairly common and are experience by about 1 in 5 people in a year period. However, people with the disorder often are more disabled because their dread and belief that they of panic episodes that often seem to come ‘out of the blue’. 

Commonly people with the disorder develop avoidance of any situation in which they might have these symptoms. Even though people with the disorder often feel hopeless about ever overcoming this scary problem, effective methods have been devised and used for more than 20 years and can be relatively brief.

What is Agoraphobia?

Agoraphobia is not a disorder in the common sense but often occurs as a consequence of panic disorder and is commonly described as a fear of being in places where they might be embarrassed with symptoms of a panic episode.  Often they fear that if in public they might need medical or mental health aids to prevent the dire consequences they fear.

This condition, if untreated along with panic disorder can have devastating effects on the quality of life since people often have great difficulty leaving their homes or places of comfort and very often crave the support of a companion that might soothe anxiety and help out.

What is Social Anxiety Disorder?

Social anxiety ranges from simply being shy to experiencing such anxiety that the person with this disorder can be seriously impaired and avoiding social contact as much as possible.

In my experience I see many people who are employed in occupations which require minimal social contact using skills such as engineering or computer programming but run into trouble when they are asked to manage others or give presentations.  Also, I have worked with others who need to make marketing calls. 

However, people with high social anxiety generally have problems in social situations because these are triggers for challenging their self-esteem and they learn to focus inside which almost inevitably turns to negative self evaluations, including the fear of failure or being seen as inferior.

So deeply held are these beliefs that it is not uncommon for people seeking treatment to fear that I would judge them as harshly as they judge themselves. They tend to predict social failure before events and even if there is no objective evidence of being rejected or slighted they agonize over the negative possibilities of social events after they are again alone.  Thus, their minds are often very active and self focused on their inadequacies. Often, in addition to running into problems of social performance on the job they lead lonely lives outside of their families.

I am a licensed and experienced anxiety therapist in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with many clients to help them overcome the anxiety-related challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free half hour phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. Find out more at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490 for more information.

Some situations that are common stressors for many people include financial uncertainty, troublesome relationships and health concerns.  Herbert Benson, M.D. has researched and published a list of stressors (such as marriage, divorce, deaths in the family), and given them scores, the higher the more likely they are to be troublesome. You can find many references to this scale by using Major Life Event Stress Scale in a search engine to evaluate your stressors and how serious they are to your health. I will continue to write about common ways to manage these kinds of situations.

But many stressed people either don’t know what exactly stresses them or, on the other hand, almost everything seems stressful.  Per Anxiety Association of America’s  email to me:

“This holiday season is particularly challenging. Whether you’re worried about your job, college tuition, retirement savings, or buying gifts, few of us have been unscathed by our turbulent economy. Even so, most of you recognize that your anxiety is normal and you’re able to carry on with daily activities.

But for some people, anxiety isn’t just a consequence of distressing news. It is persistent, severe, unprovoked, and irrational, and it makes even the most mundane tasks — driving kids to school, standing in line at the store, meeting a friend for lunch seem overwhelming, if not impossible."

Are you feeling stressed? Take advantage of my offer for a free ½ hour telephone consultation NOW to greatly reduce anxiety by learning scientifically proven methods that will help you with your unique problems. You can learn more about my approach to stress management at my personal website found here. What have you got to lose except your stress?

References: Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress. A Harvard Medical School Special Health Report.