Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by frequent, irrational, and uncontrollable worry about everyday subjects such as health, family, work, money, etc. These worries cause excessive stress, and negatively impact your daily life.

Symptoms & signs of generalized anxiety disorder

• Inability to stop worrying about your concerns
• Feelings of never-ending stress
• Fatigue
• Sleeping issues (trouble staying or falling asleep)
• Trouble catching your breath
• Headaches
• Digestive issues and upset stomach
• Being easily startled and/or quick to panic
• Trying to control situations that are not often within your control (for example, preventing a plane from crashing or preventing a loved one from getting a disease) sometimes with simply worrying, superstitions, or even non-related repetitive behaviours

When is it time to get help?

Feeling like you are personally responsible for every outcome in your life and often your loved ones’ lives as well, can be a huge burden and can be exhausting. Living in constant fear and worry can feel like a life half-lived. If you are feeling this way, then it is time to seek help!

Generalized anxiety disorder treatment methods

There are several effective treatments for generalized anxiety disorder:

• Acceptance and commitment therapy encourages clients to accept the difficulties and misfortunes of life. Clients learn coping techniques to not dwell on negative emotions by staying in the present.
• Behaviour therapy tends to view human beings and behaviour with the assumption that humans are a product of their sociocultural conditioning and environment, looking at the current problems and the factors influencing them and emphasizes behaviour changes more than the underlying unconscious processes.
• Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based approach to treatment that focuses on how people’s thoughts, emotions, and beliefs influence their behaviour and how they perceive themselves.
• Person Centered Therapy differs from more traditional therapeutic approaches in the belief that, while the therapist has expertise in many areas, the client is the expert on themselves and their lived experiences. People are essentially trustworthy and have a vast potential for understanding themselves while also being able to ultimately resolve their own problems when guided properly.
• Crucible approach therapy. Crucible® Therapy or the Crucible Approach is an integrated therapeutic approach that started out as an integrated treatment for sex, intimacy, and relationship problems. With couples, the therapist will ultimately push them outside of their comfort zone and develop new comfort zones by becoming more emotionally mature.
• Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is a treatment method that’s similar to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) but emphasizes building skills to manage stress, emotional response and regulation, mental health issues, and the psycho-social aspects of relationship building.
• Eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is defined by EMDR Canada as an integrative psychotherapy approach that has been extensively researched and proven effective for the treatment of trauma and many other mental health problems that utilized bilateral eye stimulation or somatic responding.
• Emotionally focused therapy is based on observations and experience. It looks at emotions and emotional intelligence, which helps support stronger and more secure relationships by helping better understand how our actions impact others, and how our emotions drive our interaction.
• Hypnosis and hypnotherapy can allow clients to travel deeper into the unconscious or subconscious to look at and work with issues and ideas perhaps inaccessible otherwise. It’s like guided daydreaming: a form of relaxed concentration.
• Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is an effective, research-backed, non-invasive process in which a focused magnetic field stimulates under-active brain cells, activates them to work more efficiently and transforms lives through symptom reduction. rTMS can be particularly effective when used to treat severe depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, OCD, chronic pain, migraines, post concussion symptoms, and burnout that has not fully responded to conventional treatments (medication/therapy).

A combination of the treatments may help as well. Your therapist will do an assessment then discuss with you the best approach for your particular circumstances.

What will I get out of treatment with Insight Psychological?

We can help to free you from this ongoing anxiety you’ve been experiencing. We can help you with strategies to minimize worrying and to start living a fuller life. Please contact Insight Psychological today to see what can be done to treat your generalized anxiety disorder.