Motherhood can feel like a constant flood of stress, overwhelm, and anxiety. With all the loud noises, never-ending requests for help, constant touching, and overstimulating toys, being a mom in and of itself can cause extreme anxiety. When anxiety isn’t dealt with it can cause additional problems such as panic attack disorder, depression, and chronic stress.
What do you do as a mom with anxiety when feel like you’ve tried everything to cope with the anxiety on their own? Online therapy using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) methods has been proven as an effective way to combat anxiety and reduce stress.
How Do I Know If I’m Experiencing Anxiety?
Everyone feels anxious at times. Anxiety might look like feeling incredibly nervous before a presentation at work or having butterflies in your stomach before your daughter’s ballet recital. For someone struggling with clinical anxiety, this feeling is much more intense and much more common.
Generalized anxiety disorder is defined as a mental health condition involving extreme and persistent worry about everyday issues, like keeping the house in order, staying on top of work while also parenting, or your financial well-being. In some cases, anxiety may occur for seemingly no reason at all. In addition to feeling worried, you may experience other signs of anxiety such as:
Restlessness
Exhaustion
Irritability
Feeling “wound up”
Headaches
Muscle aches
Stomach pains
Hyperactivity
Racing and unwanted thoughts
Intrusive thoughts
A tendency to think the ‘worst case scenario’
An excessive need to plan out everything
Anger
Insomnia
Anxiety doesn’t simply affect your mind. While intrusive, worrisome thoughts are at the core of anxiety disorder, when left untreated they can cause a host of other health problems, such as nausea, muscle tension, or headaches.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the most common techniques used for battling those negative thoughts at the root of anxiety. This method of therapy has been used for decades and has been proven to help individuals struggling with anxiety regain their thoughts and redirect them into healthier ways of thinking.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is described as a technique in therapy used to help people understand their thought patterns while understanding how their thoughts contribute to their behavior. Through CBT, clients are guided to learn how to use their coping skills to manage stress and anxiety.
In addition, CBT explores the connection between how thoughts control our emotions, how emotions control our behavior, and how our behavior ultimately creates our reality.
What Are The Benefits of Using CBT For Anxiety?
CBT is a wonderful option for moms that experience a brain that runs nonstop with worries, overwhelm, and anxiety about the future. You may be experiencing excessive fear that your child will fall ill, excessive worry that they may have a learning disability or excessive anxiety that they’re not protected enough from the troubles of this world.
With cognitive behavioral therapy, you’ll be able to express these worries with your online therapist who can then help you see them from another perspective. Your counselor can also help you seek out new patterns of thinking that are much healthier for you and your child.
A few benefits of using CBT for anxiety include:
CBT helps you become aware of faulty thinking
CBT enables you to realize any catastrophic thoughts
CBT enables you to deal with larger problems by breaking them into smaller pieces
CBT helps you learn coping skills for anxiety at home
CBT enables you to deal with any current problems at hand (rather than exploring the past)
CBT enables you to respond to challenges in a more rational way
Cognitive behavioral therapy helps women with anxiety change the way they think as well as alter the way they behave when they are experiencing anxious thoughts. It can help you identify problematic areas of thinking and then use those tools to change how you respond to those anxious thoughts.
How Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Target My Anxiety?
In cognitive behavioral therapy, any anxious thought is linked to increasing your feelings of fear and worry. CBT works to target anxious thoughts that have an impact on your behaviors. One way CBT targets these distorted thoughts is by identifying what kinds of thoughts they are and adjusting your ways of coping with those thoughts.
Magnification:
The anxious style of thinking gives too much thought to small, or otherwise unimportant details, blowing them far out of proportion. Through the use of CBT, your therapist can guide you in seeing the bigger picture, or a different perspective of the situation. This can interrupt those catastrophic thoughts and help you realize how minimal the trigger really was.
Fortune Telling:
The anxious style of thinking focuses on predicting the future despite little to no evidence suggesting something bad is going to happen. Through CBT techniques, you and your therapist can begin to envision more positive or realistic outcomes for a situation, as well as use mindfulness techniques to bring your mental focus to the present instead of the future.
Comparison:
The anxious style of thinking deals with negative thoughts about yourself simply because you perceive someone else as being ‘better’ at it. Through CBT, you can begin to address these self-destructive thoughts with your therapist. by doing so, you can focus on stopping them in your head when they arise. Through mind-visual techniques, you can then redirect them down a better path.
Filtering:
This anxious style of thinking occurs when you ‘filter out’ certain information in a scenario that either doesn’t fit your beliefs or simply doesn’t match with what you believe the outcome will be. Through CBT, your therapist can help you see any parts of the problem you may be leaving out or choosing to ignore. From there you can develop a more realistic way of seeing the situation.
Can Online Therapy Help Me With My Anxiety?
Online therapy for anxiety has been proven to be just as effective as in-person treatment. Since it’s one of the most widespread treatment methods out there, finding an online therapist with knowledge of CBT is likely easier than you may think. If you are looking for a therapist that specializes in CBT for anxiety, be sure to ask them in your initial intake appointment if they are trained in this kind of therapy.
Begin CBT for Anxiety in Mililani, HI, Florida, Colorado, and Louisiana
Your kids, and you, deserve a mom that can live her life without the debilitating thoughts of fear and worry. CBT can help improve mood, promote better sleep, and enhance your life overall. It may just be the best thing you ever do for yourself and your family. I’d be happy to offer CBT for anxiety and a variety of other mental health services via online anxiety therapy. I offer support across Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Florida. To start your therapy journey, please follow these simple steps:
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation via phone or video
Start improving your mental health!
Other Services Offered With Ashley Comegys, LCSW
CBT for anxiety isn’t the only service I offer the residents of Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Florida. I’m happy to offer a variety of services in support of your mental health. Other services offered include counseling for moms, online postpartum depression treatment, online postpartum support, and online depression treatment. I’m also happy to offer online grief counseling for women and online trauma treatment for women. Visit my blog or about page to learn more today!