Counselling can serve as a highly effective anxiety treatment. Read on to find out why.

It can enable you to establish the root cause of your anxiety

If you decide to have counselling in order to treat your anxiety, your counsellor will probably spend your first couple of sessions discussing your past. They may ask you about your childhood, your relationship with your parents and any traumatic experiences you have gone through. Learning about significant events and people in your life can help your counsellor to determine the root cause of your anxiety.

For example, if you have developed social anxiety, your counselling sessions may help you to discover that the underlying cause is, for instance, the fact that you were bullied at school or that you grew up in a hostile home environment with unsupportive or highly critical parents.

This can help you to better understand why you feel the way that you do, as well as what kind of situations or people are likely to trigger your anxiety. This, in turn, should make it much easier for you and your counsellor to decide what approach to take when it comes to treating your mental illness.

It can provide you with tools to help you cope with your anxiety

A lot of people suffer from some form of anxiety on a regular basis. However, most of these individuals have been taught healthy coping mechanisms which enable them to manage and reduce their anxiety levels. However, if you have never been shown how to cope with your anxiety in a healthy manner, you may feel so overwhelmed by it that you find yourself unable to participate in your usual daily activities.

If you have counselling, your counsellor will be able to teach you a variety of safe, healthy ways to reduce the intensity of your anxiety so that it no longer interferes with things such as your job, your social life or your hobbies. They may, for example, teach you some deep-breathing techniques that you can employ in situations which usually cause you to feel extreme anxiety; these techniques can help to calm your nervous system down and thus minimise the chances of you experiencing a full-blown panic attack.

Additionally, they may show you how to 'ground' yourself during moments when your anxious thoughts are starting to spiral out of control; this usually involves using all five of your senses to identify things in your immediate physical environment (for instance, you may be taught to search for something you can smell, see, touch, taste or hear in your surroundings).