How to Fix Anxiety - A Review of Treatments

There are many different types of anxiety and around twice as many treatments. There are therapies that can treat anxiety, and medications that can help it, and many people also manage to cure their own anxiety. So how do you choose what treatment to go for? How can you decide how to fix your anxiety?

There are many types of therapies. These can be very expensive, however, with some professionals charging hundreds per hour. There are so many types of therapy that it can be confusing choosing the one that is best suited to your particular type of anxiety. These therapies often require a long time before you are able to live a normal life, sometimes meaning that patients are in therapy for months or years.

Medication is another way to treat anxiety, but unless you're a doctor this can be a frightening idea. Many medications only treat the symptoms of anxiety, meaning that your anxiety may come back as soon as you stop the medication. Many medications also have uncomfortable side effects that include physical effects and mental effects. SSRIs for example can increase suicidal urges in some people! Stronger medications are addictive meaning that the dosage has to be continually upped or that patients can only use them for a short period of time before being dropped back into their anxiety.

Self-help techniques are plentiful. From visualization techniques to meeting your "spirit guide," thousands of books claim they can fix your anxiety forever. But very few techniques work for all anxieties, and not very many work at all! Self-help can be effective, but it doesn't have the encouragement element that therapy has where there's always someone working with you and helping you use the techniques. This makes treating your own anxiety somewhat of a trial and error process. That could mean that it takes years to get through all the set backs.

One approach to anxiety is to face it head on. Instead of avoiding situations in which anxiety occurs, the patient goes through their normal life until they find themselves feeling anxious. When they do, they do not run away from the situation, they simply observe the anxiety as it passes by. This proves that the panic attack or anxious feelings are not harmful. It also proves that the situation is not harmful. This technique is based in Buddhist meditation in which the meditator watches thoughts without becoming attached or avoiding them.