Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Anxiety is a completely normal emotion that helps you prepare for danger and pull yourself together in stress. It can be useful at the most critical moment.

It is quite another matter when the anxiety is very strong and accompanies you most of the time, beyond the obvious dangers. It inevitably spoils the quality of life.

Worrying thoughts about problems and potential dangers prevent you from living the way you want and doing the things you want.

You feel that if it weren't for your anxiety, you would be doing so much more and living a different, fuller life.

Quarrels with a partner or tension in a relationship can be very exhausting: the game of silence, unspoken resentments, accumulated claims.

It is difficult to remember where it all started and to understand how to untangle it all. And should it be done at all?

You feel confused when pressure is put on you, you don't know how to resist it.

It is difficult for you to defend your interests, you do not know how to refuse, otherwise you are eaten away by guilt. You are often offended because others use you.

You wake up in the morning already exhausted and for a long time can not get out of bed. You feel emptiness and absence of any desires.

Everything around becomes colorless. No pleasure or interest, only indifference. Desires disappear: you don't want anything.

You experience low energy, insomnia or excessive drowsiness, lack of appetite. Even the usual daily routine becomes overwhelming: take a shower, eat, go to the store.

You may feel guilt and shame even for the fact of your existence, hopelessness and deep despair.

You experience panic attacks in certain circumstances - important negotiations, flights, confined space, crowding of people, public speaking. That’s why you try to avoid being in these circumstances.

Physiological manifestations are so powerful — palpitations, dizziness, nausea, you break into sweat — that it seems you may not survive another PA, therefore you protect your life from any stress, depriving yourself of a number of opportunities.

Obsessive thoughts and images capture you: falling asleep in bed, you suddenly shudder at the thought that you might not have closed the front door and run to check; you return halfway home to make sure you turned off the iron or turned off the faucet; you wash your hands many times and for a long time during the day, because you have hold the door knob or have taken someone else's phone in your hands (and this was the case even in the pre-COVID era!)

If something doesn't go according to plan, you attack yourself: "I screwed up again!" This can turn into a wheel of self-blame and self-deprecation with the eternal question "What is wrong with me?"

This destructive coping strategy is maladaptive and harmful. A better option would be to wipe your optics and see yourself who you are. And learn how to support yourself.

It is difficult for you to meet and develop a relationship with a partner you are interested in.

You don't know what you can do to interest the person you need, you are afraid to show yourself and prefer to stay in the shadows.

Any kind of attention exhausts you, and a simple conversation with a colleague you happen to meet in the kitchen causes a lot of tension. To maintain the status quo, you avoid all communication whenever possible.