Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Chemainus, BC.

Everyone reacts differently to stress and there can be variance depending on what the stress stimulus is! Knowing how you respond can be helpful when learning to cope with stress or anxiety. Fight, flight, freeze, and appease are types of responses that are reactive to stress and anxiety. Flight response includes avoiding situations, people, or thoughts. Those who react with fight tend to feel frustrated and irritable. This can look like bursts of anger or resistance to situations and people. Those who freeze tend to shut down, feel like they are disconnected from themselves or the world, or feel stuck in the stressful situation. Therapy can help mitigate some of these responses.

Anxiety can be debilitating. Uncovering the underlying causes for the worries and fears then learning how to relax will help control your anxiety levels, stop worrisome thoughts, and conquer your fears. Developing more positive coping and problem solving skills will provide you with life long tools for managing unexpected situations. Realizing it is your thoughts and their perceptions, not the external event, that affects the way you feel and react, will allow you to replace the negative reaction with positive ones. Stress can be managed by taking control. Prioritize, identify the major source then each additional one then follow through with changes remembering you are in control.

Anxiety and Stress are very common reactions in today's world. Life can feel overwhelming, and managing all the moving pieces is just too much. My approach to this is to find ways to de-stress and make sure that a client's stress load is not always hovering at the 'boiling over' line. Clients have reported that using certain techniques to approach stress has been useful while also navigating the underlying issues.

Anxiety as a result of stress is one of, if not the major contributing factor to poor health in most areas of people lives. If you have ever been tense before an exam or a visit to the dentist, you have a felt anxiety. Increased heart rate, sweating, rapid breathing, dry mouth, & a sense of dread are common. Changing this involves cognitive & behavioural approaches. Cognitive change is understanding how thoughts contribute to symptoms and how to change thought patterns to reduce the intensity of your anxiety. And behavioral changes involve using techniques to reduce or stop any undesired behaviors that are a result of the anxiety you have been experiencing.

Prolonged stress and anxiety can result in impairment to our mental and physical health. We may experience high blood pressure, significant weight loss or gain, inability to concentrate or sleep, panic attacks, agitation and irritability. Overtime, these ailments can not only decrease our life satisfaction, but reduced our overall health. Don’t ignore the symptoms. Get help. Counselling can help you learn ways to cope, identify the underlying causes of your stress and explore ways to reduce stress and anxiety in your life.

Chronic stress and anxiety when untreated can make just 'regular human function' feel like an unsurmountable task. Anxiety tends to be a downstream symptom of other psychological dynamics and experiences, so understanding how we got here can help us process their impact and develop tools to increase resiliency, improve insight, and manage feelings and emotions.

Anxiety can severely impact the quality of a person's life. It can impact their sleep, work, relationships, school, and their physical health. Sometimes, anxiety can become so intense that people experience physical symptoms like sweating, heart racing, dizziness, nausea, etc. The good news is that there are effective psychological treatments for anxiety. CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy), which is the type of therapy I practice, is an evidence-based approach that provides individuals with skills to help manage their anxiety and get control over their lives back.

Stress can prompt the cracks in our normal ways of coping to come into sharp focus. Similarly, anxiety can be all consuming, causing us to replay the tapes of our past over and over again. We may even be spending hours reviewing the tapes of events that only ever took place in our heads! The result is exhaustion and avoidance of anything that feels overwhelming. As a result, life can become small as we limit ourselves to our comfort zone. Unfortunately, this is when depression can creep in for a double-whammy. Yuck! Luckily, stress/anxiety is highly treatable. I work with clients to develop the insights and acquire the tools to overcome stress and anxiety. There is hope. Promise!

While our bodies are perfectly designed to adapt and react to stress, modern problems mean that we tend to detect life threatening dangers in very ordinary places. Conflicts at work, arguments in our relationships and uncertainties such as the post-Covid world activate old survival mechanisms. We may be stuck in the buzzing, fear states of ‘fight-flight’ or the numb and paralyzed states of ‘freeze and shut down.’ The good news is that I have a long history of safely and successfully helping individuals and couples to reduce and release stress using a variety of CBT and mindfulness techniques, as well as trauma-informed therapy. You have my commitment to compassionate and educated care.

While most treatment approaches for anxiety and stress are effective on the surface, they don’t treat the real problem. Mantras, deep breathing, and rational dialogues about your fear being irrational rarely work---for most people don’t believe it or you! Imagine if you can trick the brain into changing without you telling your conscious mind that you are changing it? Problem with anxiety and stress is that the brain in this state knows you want to change it and it resists. Contact Kevin@kevinflemingphd.com for the ultimate stress and anxiety solution that will literally change your brain's autonomic nervous system patterns while you sit on your butt. 877-606-6161.

Everyone has anxiety and stress in their life! It is important to evaluate where the majority of it comes from and discover ways to cope at times that are difficult and challenging. It is also critical to recognize when anxiety and stress is past a point that is manageable. Some treatment methods I would use would be grounding techniques, meditation, and Socratic questioning. These techniques would be used to figure out the root cause of the anxiety and stress and also to help determine the cause. Other strategies that may be applied include journalling, incorporating exercise, and other activities to help manage both the anxiety and stress.

Do you worry about not being enough, not doing enough, trying to be perfect? Are you constantly wondering what others are thinking and saying. Maybe you worry about your anxiety, about anxiety symptoms like racing heart, chronic pain or dizziness and fatigue. If you have panic attacks, this can cause you to worry about having a panic attack as well as the actual trigger of the attack. Learn to find your triggers. Cognitive behavioural therapy has tools to help you overcome the fear. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe you are enough and that perfection is some ideal that you never have to achieve because you are okay. Just the way you are. A work in progress and that's okay. Acceptance.