Worries are part of everyone’s life. You worry about matching your clothing so you look good at work. You worry about being late to an appointment. However you do not worry about having a hangnail develop into an infection that requires amputation of a finger. Someone who requires Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment will worry about things that are terribly unlikely to occur.
He or she is letting worry interrupt the normal flow of daily life. It becomes impossible to enjoy anything or relax for any moment because of incorrect negative beliefs. CBT will take these negative thoughts and turn them inside out to disprove them to the client. The automatic negative thoughts will be proved erroneous.
GAD can be treated effectively with CBT, which helps to view automatic negative beliefs in light of reality. The catastrophizing he or she does is viewing each event as something that will go terribly wrong. This is at the root of the anxiety suffered each day.
Treating GAD with CBT has been helping clients to recover. Catastrophizing is the act of expecting the worst possible thing to happen in any situation. The therapist helps dispel these expectations and replace them with realistic ones.
The habit of catastrophizing can be confronted and challenged to change the negative automatic thoughts. For example, a person is obsessed with the fear of someone in the family having a car accident. Together, client and therapist might research the percentage of the population who actually have an auto accident each day, week, month or year. This will help elucidate the fact that chances are miniscule that one of his or her family members will be among that small percentage.
The five things that make CBT an effective treatment plan for GAD are education, monitoring, developing a strategy to gain physical control, learning cognitive control strategies and learning behavioral control methods to combat the unrealistic fears. Education teaches how to identify helpful worries and unhelpful worries. Understanding the difference helps to sort out the negative beliefs. Next, the therapist helps the client learn to monitor the daily anxiety. Keep track of triggers and track progress in dismissing negative beliefs.
CBT then uses deep breathing and muscle relaxation techniques to overcome the fear and anxiety. These physical control methods help control the fight or flight response that is reserved for extraordinary situations in non-GAD people.
The next technique is gaining the ability to challenge negative automatic thoughts and begin to recognize how unrealistic they are. He or she learns to realize that worry does not positively or negatively affect any occurrence. In other words, worry is not going to prevent anything from happening so is useless.
By confronting each fear the client will become desensitized to it. He or she will see that what they feared is not a consequence of any situation. The fears will be disproved and thus, alleviated.
Generalized Disorder Treatment Therapy can be combined with medication to treat GAD. Therapeutic intervention can be effective on a short-term basis. The client can practice newly acquired techniques on his or her own. The medication can be a temporary measure. The anti-anxiety drug, Buspirone, Benzodiazepines (short-term only due to addictive qualities) or antidepressants, which have side effects such as not taking effect for weeks and causing nausea and insomnia. While medication is temporary, the techniques learned and practiced to confront and combat GAD can be acquired and incorporated into life for the long-term.
Finding generalized anxiety disorder treatment methods is as simple as searching online. When you plan to cure panic attacks using natural and gentle tactics, you will be successful.