The Challenges of Anxiety and a List of

Anxiety Symptoms / Signs

 

 

Sustained worry can interfere with your sleep, create difficulties in decision-making or completing a task, and in the long run, can damage your health. 

Worry can exhaust you to the point of feeling consumed on a mental, emotional, and physical level.

Anxiety often causes an excessive release of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain.

Prolong exposure to these chemicals can have ill side effects such as, becoming increasingly aggressive toward others, suspicious thinking, causing some types of depression, hyperactivity, attention deficit, digestive problems, nausea, and increase blood pressure.

Experiencing anxiety in response to a real life stressor is a healthy response. Everyone experiences a certain level of anxiety in their life.

However, feeling recurring worry, apprehension, nervousness or dread, increase heart-rate, fast breathing, or mental confusion with the absence of a specific stressful experience are all possible anxiety related challenges.

Here is a general list of anxiety symptoms:

• Numbness and tingling
• Cold or sweaty hands or feet
• Dry mouth
• Muscle tension or weakness in limbs
• Shortness of breath
• Feeling fear of uneasiness
• Rapid heartbeat
• Nausea and dizziness
• Weakness 
• Stomach upset
• Mind racing
• Inability to be calm, still, or rest

If you can relate so some of these and you want to find a solution, know that there is professional help available and that it is possible to treat your anxiety.

  

Treating different types and levels of anxiety: A

comprehensive approach in anxiety counseling and

anxiety therapy

 

How is anxiety treated?

The best approach to treating anxiety identifies the type of anxiety you may have, the causes of your anxiety, and creates deep inner resources. This is,

 

A Comprehensive Transpersonal Anxiety Treatment

 

This type of anxiety therapy works on two main fronts: it addresses the challenge of anxiety itself, and it develops capacities and qualities in you to support you in the process of facing the anxiety.

 

1) This means that transpersonal anxiety counseling helps you resolve the challenge of anxiety itself which may be caused by,

• Stress in family, with friends, in a romantic relationship, or due to separation or divorce
• Stress at work or problems with finances
• Stress at school, with teachers, with homework, and peer pressure
• Stress due to a medical illness
• Side effects of medications
• Caffeine
• Trauma or PTSD (growing up in a household where parents were not very present, not caring enough, or were angry, anxious, depressed, or violent).

And, while addressing these specific challenges, transpersonal anxiety therapy helps you create, and get in touch with, inner and outer positive resources that you may have lost touch with due to difficult life events.

You will become in touch with the parts of you that are strong and give you support, that are free, dynamic, self-assured, and confident.

By connecting with these inner resources, resolving the challenges of anxiety, or anxiety symptoms, is easier and more effective.

 

2) In addition to that, a transpersonal anxiety treatment can address existential anxiety, existential angst, and subtler levels of nervousness and discomfort. Some anxiety symptoms of this type can be:

• Recurrent worry about questions such as, ““What is the point of life? Why am I here? Is this all there is in life? Is there more? I have wasted my life. What is left in my life now that I am getting older?” may indicate some existential anxiety or existential angst.
• The subtle fear of being your fully true authentic self—around people at work, with friends, or with your significant other—that makes you hide parts of yourself for fear of rejection or getting hurt.
• The subtle fear of being completely emotionally open and intimate with your partner.

Addressing these subtler levels of fear, existential anxiety and existential angst brings a deeper level of comfort with yourself and other and greater fulfillment in your life.

 

3) But there is more, if the following applies to you or have interest, transpersonal anxiety treatment can include spiritual counseling (Easter and Western spiritual traditions are included), which addresses fear and anxiety on a spiritual level. Some of the spiritual anxiety symptoms are the following:

• Anxiety caused by spiritual experiences, ego dissolution, ego transcendence, or fear of transcending the body and the world.
• Anxiety about transitioning between your old ego self and your new authentic “self.”
• Anxiety about interacting with people at work, with friends of family members from a non-dual place.
• The anxiety and pain from feeling spiritually disconnected and alienated from the divine.
• The anxiety of having to become spiritual realized before you die.
• Anxiety around spiritual and religious beliefs that

If not addressed and overcome, spiritual related anxiety, dread, or fear, can hinder one’s spiritual progress or relationship to the God or the divine. Please refer to this link spiritual crisis for a detail discussion on spiritual challenges, or to spiritual development and spiritual integration for a discussion on spiritual growth.

Transpersonal Anxiety Counseling addresses: normal types of anxiety (mainstream psychotherapy), existential anxiety (existential psychotherapy), and spiritual anxiety (spiritual counseling).

 

You may have concerns about your anxiety signs/symptoms, or how is anxiety treated in therapy.

 

 

• I have anxiety symptoms but they are not related to existential or spirituality anxiety. Can you still help me? Yes, I can help you address your specific issue of anxiety, without looking at existential anxiety, or spiritual anxiety. A transpersonal anxiety treatment meets you where you are. It does not impose a specific anxiety treatment.

• I do not want to stop using anxiety medications; yet, I think that using anxiety medication for a long time can affect my health. Anxiety medication can work and be effective for many years; yet in the long run they can damage your health. Ideally, anxiety medication are used to support you in your life while you address the causes of your anxiety. This means taking the medication while going to therapy to find out why you are anxious. By addressing the cause of your anxiety and finding ways to manage or even resolve your specific challenge that causes you anxiety, you can choose to reduce the dosage of your medication and notice how it feels. Often, through anxiety treatment, one can resolve the causes of anxiety. When this occurs, people naturally stop using their medications. Of course, there can be some dependency created by the medications. That can be addressed and overcome as well. In most cases, people do not have to live all their life taking medications.

• Sometime my life lacks meaning, it feels pointless and empty, and I feel anxious about it. I have been told it is existential angst and existential anxiety. I believe that this is just part of being human, and I don’t think one can get rid of these feelings. But I do not know. Do you think that transpersonal anxiety counseling can help? Yes, painful existential feelings are often a difficult aspect of the human experience. But let me ask you, have you ever been able to follow the existential feeling itself all the way without getting lost in it? Sages would say that only when you are able to do that, then you can really understand the meaning of the existential feeling and surmount it. Spiritual counseling supports people in this specific exploration.

• Can anxiety therapy eliminate anxiety? What will that feel like? It is possible to not always feel anxious and worried. You may still get nervous if you experience a real stressful event, but that is a healthy psychological and biological response. In your daily life, in the absence of a real stressor, however, you will feel at peace with yourself, feel connected to your inner sense of support, have mental clarity, have stamina, and wake up in the morning rested. 

• Is anxiety treatment painful? No, it is not painful, it is the opposite of painful. It calms you down, it teaches you how to relax, and most of all shows you how to face and go through your anxiety while feeling fully resourced and without being afraid of it.

• What does transpersonal anxiety therapy look like? How is anxiety treated? Each person is different and has different signs of anxiety. But generally, people who have anxiety difficulties, experience an excess of anxiety for specific reasons (although it may not seem that way) and because they are disconnected from a deeper sense of inner support. In therapy, I will help you find and further develop strong inner and outer resources that will support you and allow you to face your anxiety from a confident place. While doing so, I will help you find the cause of your anxiety and what started your anxiety in your life (although you may feel that you have always been anxious and there is no specific cause). And, I will also help you deal with those specific difficulties while showing you hands-on specific tools on how to surmount these difficult feelings. Most importantly, during treatment I will create a comfortable and friendly atmosphere where you can feel welcome, at ease and relaxed.

• What do you mean by religious or spiritual anxiety in the context of transpersonal anxiety psychotherapy? On a religious level, spiritual anxiety symptoms may look like fear or anxiety about displeasing God, sinning, not feeling accepted by one’s own community, feeling empty or disconnected to one’s faith and God in one’s life and in one’s prayers.

On a spiritual level, a common experience of anxiety can occur when people try to quiet their mind and inner experience while practicing meditation, mindful prayer or inner contemplation. The quieting of the mind brings internal silence and stillness. For people not accustomed to this experience, the absence of thoughts may create much anxiety and fear. These can hinder one’s meditation and spiritual progress.

A common experience of anxiety for experienced spiritual practitioners is a deep type of anxiety that may surface during different levels of ego dissolution such as, deep feelings of emptiness, voidness, or expansion beyond the body that can feel life-threatening. These feelings can become a significant obstacle to one’s spiritual progress.

Transpersonal anxiety counseling has developed specific techniques to help people overcome these inner terrifying feeling of emptiness, ego death, and boundless expansion in order to facilitate one’s meditation and spiritual progress. This type of anxiety treatment is often successful.

 

A real life example of anxiety therapy

 

Joe (his name and all identifiable factors have been changed) came to see me because he was experiencing strong feelings of anxiety and existential angst, which increased during his daily meditation. Due to his anxiety, he often tried to avoid social situations, he had stopped meditating, and he preferred to stay alone at home where he felt safe.

Joe and I worked on his challenges with anxiety. I helped Joe find the cause of his anxiety and find ways to address that cause. Sharing his burden and receiving support helped Joe find his internal support and strength that he was not aware he had. By using specific tools he was able to overcome the source of his anxiety.

Today, Joe has learned to manage his anxiety. Now, instead of avoiding social situations he embraces them with more confidence. He has also overcome his spiritual anxiety and has learned how to face the anxiety related to his ego dissolution that he sometimes experiences in meditation. Joe feels more confident about his life and at work.

 

Call me for a free consultation or to try a therapy

session with no financial obligations

 

I can help you manage or overcome your anxiety, worry, fear, and feelings of being overwhelmed.

In therapy, I create a compassionate, safe, warm, and friendly atmosphere where you can feel at ease and relaxed. I adapt therapy to your specific needs, background, belief system, and psychological makeup to make therapy most effective.

On a technical level, I use psychological and neuroscientific tools to treat anxiety, and I use the wisdom of Eastern and Western philosophical and spiritual traditions to help you develop different types of mindfulness techniques and a general sense of well-being in life. The combination of the two is very effective to treating anxiety, PTSD/trauma, and depression.

With these tool, together we can find the best way to help you manage and overcome your anxiety.  

 

You can call me for a free consultation (the phone number is at the very top and bottom of this page) or click the green button below “Get Started Today” to find out about trying the first therapy session with me with no financial obligation. Or you can learn more about me or email me for questions or to set up an appointment.

Regardless if you choose me as your therapist or not, I strongly recommend to read the Free Report “The 3 Keys for Choosing the Right Therapist for You” (you can download it here). This Free Report aims to empower you as a client by helping you evaluate your therapy and therapist. People have found it very helpful to learn specific ways on how to determine if their therapist is a good fit for them and can really help them, or if they are actually wasting their time because some therapy key-factors are missing and they actually need to change therapist.