Anxiety Cures – Your Options
Friday, August 13th, 2010From psychotherapy to medications, from alternative medicine to lifestyle modifications and self-help strategies, there is a wide range of options when it comes to treating anxiety disorder. All these so-called anxiety cures options try to help reduce the symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder and other relevant conditions as well as prevent these from occurring again.
{Therapies}
The first line of treatment for anxiety disorder is often composed psychotherapy|psychotherapeutic tools.
A psychotherapeutic technique, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a standard method for treatment of anxiety disorders. This therapy uses techniques that first examine the distortion in the thinking pattern of an individual. Once the negative thinking pattern has been identified, it is corrected and the patient is taught how to replace it with more appropriate thinking pattern. The basic premise here is that thoughts and not actual events are responsible for the way a person behaves. If perceptions or thoughts are positive, the behavior that comes out is positive.
There are five key components used in this therapy: education, monitoring, physical control strategies, cognitive control strategies and behavioral strategies. All this try to help an individual acquire a much healthier understanding of the condition while allowing him to form coping strategies that work to eliminate the symptoms of anxiety.
{Exposure Therapy}
It is a natural response for people is to avoid their objects of fear. This therapy tries to resolve that.
Exposure therapy, as its name suggests, exposes|a person to his actual object of fear. The premise is that repeated exposures to the actual object of fear lowers and eventually eliminate the anxiety level of an individual in relation to that object or situation. The person then ultimately regains his control over his feared object or situation.
This therapy comes in two approaches. The first approach happens mostly in the head of the patient. In the first approach, the patient creates a simulation of the situation in his mind and respond to it the same way he would in real life. The second approach, the more direct approach, actually forces the individual to confront his object of fear in real life.
Although, by themselves, both cognitive and behavioral therapy and exposure therapy work very well, most clinicians opt to combine them to deliver faster treatment.
{Medications}
Medications are generally used as temporary measures. Because of their side effects, most physicians limit the use of medications for anxiety disorders. This is not suggest, though, that symptoms are not eliminated using medications, they are.
Although there are numerous drugs used in treatment of anxiety disorders, only three classes of drugs are known to bring about the best results, these are:
{Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)}
{Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs)}
{Benzodiazpines}
For better and faster results, doctors often combine psychotherapy and medications as anxiety cures. To find out more about your options of treatment, seek the recommendations of your doctor.
