Anxiety and Depression

Managing challenges related to anxiety and depression are among the most common in the clients I work with, regardless of age, stage of life, or life circumstances. While we pretty much all deal with symptoms of anxiety and/or depression at times, sometimes these symptoms can feel like too much and get in the way of living your life they way you want to.

Anxiety can look like many different things, whether its worrying about things that might happen in the future, or not being able to stop thinking about things that have happened in the past. It can be worry around what other people think of you, so much so that you change yourself to fit the mold of others. Anxiety can heighten our stress response, causing us to respond from our flight, fight, or freeze modes. Oftentimes anxiety can cause you to feel exhausted from always be on high alert, waiting for something bad to happen or the next thing to go wrong. At the end of the day, our anxiety exists to protect us from danger and help us stay safe! Working with anxiety is working with this drive to stay safe, but helping our brains and body understand what is actually dangerous and what is just a part of life.

While many people assume that in order to be depressed you have to be sad, this isn’t always true! Of course, sadness can be a large part of experiencing depression, depression can also look very different. It can be a complete lack of care around areas of your life that were once, and should still be, important - such as relationships, work, hobbies, and taking care of yourself and your home. Depression can make it hard to focus and feel motivation to do basic tasks, causing a lot of overwhelm and stress. Maybe you feel extra exhausted all the time and feel like you could sleep forever, OR feel like no matter how tired you are, you can’t sleep at all. Regardless of how your depression presents, my goal is to help honor your capabilities and needs in these periods while also helping to take small steps towards self-care and function in order to decrease the severity of these symptoms.