Anxiety takes many forms and shapes. From isolated, specific fears of heights, spiders or snakes, to an all-encompassing and hard-to-define sense of fear of the future or of one's own failure, accompanied by a series of negative thought chains and sometimes unbearable physical discomfort.

Do you think you need help or at least want more clarity? Make an appointment for a no-obligation initial and diagnostic consultation or just give us a call, we will be happy to advise you and help you with everything. At our first meeting we will talk about your difficulties, find out the severity of your problems and the possible causes. We will suggest a course of action and, if necessary, select your personal therapist. so that it not only meets your professional requirements, but also suits you humanly.

MAKE AN APPOINTMENT FOR AN INITIAL DIAGNOSTIC CONSULTATION

A person suffering from one of the many anxiety disorders that accompany serious physical ailments needs to be relieved physically first. The most common psychosomatic symptoms (link to psychosomatic complaints) are palpitations, a feeling of heart arrhythmia, dry mouth, tightness of the throat, shortness of breath (inability to take deep breaths), increased sweat gland activity or tremors. Other typical symptoms include upset stomach, heartburn and sudden urge to vomit (but usually never actual vomiting), frequent urges to eat, bloating, flatulence or diarrhoea.

All these very unpleasant symptoms can be overcome with effective breathing and muscle exercises. Learning how to breathe properly through anxiety is sometimes difficult. An excellent aid in learning and fully automating a maximally effective breathing strategy is a breath sensor.

Thanks to this sensor, which is connected to virtual reality, the correct procedure can be fully automated with the help of the therapist in eight to ten 10-minute sessions. However, some breathing and muscle strategies can also be trained by the disabled person.

Cognitive-behavioural therapy is the method of first choice according to the results of all studies. Anxiety is a manifestation of high levels of internal stress or, in other words, significant psychological exhaustion.

It is interesting that we are often not so much exhausted by external events, demands or obligations.

On the contrary, mental exhaustion is caused by certain fixed thought and emotional patterns that continuously cause a rising level of internal stress.

Typical depleting patterns include excessive self-control, self-criticism, worry about loved ones, pressure to perform, suppression of emotions, perfectionism, and many others.

The effect of cognitive-behavioural therapy in certain cases will be greatly accelerated by exposure therapy.

However, the term cognitive behavioural therapy itself is broad, as there are several generations of this treatment method. One of them is, for example, ACT therapy or dialectical-behavioural therapy. The appropriate type of therapy is determined by a reliable diagnostic psychologist.

Medication should only be seen as a supportive adjunct to psychotherapeutic treatment in anxiety disorders. It is primarily the cause that needs to be addressed, not just the effect of the problem. Every anxious person should be wary of drugs that bring immediate relief within tens of minutes of ingestion. These drugs usually contain benzodiazepines, are highly addictive and can only be taken for a very limited time.

The more modern preparations are certainly more gentle, and their effect comes on two to four weeks after their regular use. These are drugs from the SSRI, SNRI or NaSSA group. Anxiety medication should definitely not be prescribed by a GP but by a psychiatrist in the case of more severe problems.