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Anxiety
That familiar knot in your stomach, the racing thoughts, the persistent unease – anxiety can manifest in countless ways and significantly impact our daily lives. While a natural response to perceived threats, it becomes a concern when it overwhelms us, hindering our performance and disrupting our everyday routines. You might experience a constant sense of unease, either generally or tied to specific situations.
The physical sensations of anxiety can be unsettling: a pounding heart, shortness of breath, tremors, dizziness, chest tightness, nausea, muscle tension, and headaches. These physical symptoms often intertwine with worrying thoughts, difficulty sleeping and concentrating, and a dip in self-confidence.
Different Faces:
Anxiety isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. It’s often categorized into three main types:
- Generalized Anxiety: This involves a persistent and excessive worry about various events or activities, often without a clear identifiable cause. Some describe it as “free-floating anxiety,” where the anxious person feels constantly on edge, sometimes even becoming anxious about feeling anxious. Symptoms can include irritability, difficulty concentrating, persistent negative thinking, sleep disturbances, and physical manifestations like excessive thirst, stomach upset, frequent urination, muscle aches, and headaches.
- Health Anxiety: Health anxiety is a persistent fear that something is seriously wrong with your health—even when medical exams come back normal. It often involves constant body scanning, Googling symptoms, and seeking reassurance from doctors or loved ones. While these actions might bring short-term relief, they often intensify the anxiety over time. Therapy can help you learn how to break this cycle, tolerate uncertainty, and reconnect with your body in a more grounded, peaceful way.
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- Phobias: These involve intense and irrational fears of specific objects or situations, leading to significant avoidance behaviors. You can find more information about phobias at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
- Panic Disorder: Characterized by sudden episodes of intense fear that peak quickly, often accompanied by physical symptoms like heart palpitations, sweating, and a feeling of losing control. You can learn more about panic disorder on the Anxiety & Depression Association of America (ADAA).
The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety:
Stressful situations at work or home can easily spill over into other areas of life, triggering anxiety. Similarly, a frightening experience can lead to lingering fear, as seen in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The interplay between mental and physical anxiety symptoms can create a challenging cycle. A physical symptom might trigger anxious thoughts, which in turn intensify the physical sensations, leading to a feeling of being trapped. In panic attacks, this cycle escalates rapidly. Even the effort of trying to control it can be stressful, inadvertently fueling the problem.
Strategies for Managing Anxiety:
Understanding how it works – as a combination of physical and mental responses rooted in the “fight or flight” mechanism – is the first step towards regaining control. Here are some helpful strategies:
- Relaxation Techniques: While not an instant cure, consistent practice of relaxation exercises like guided imagery and progressive muscle relaxation can significantly reduce it over time.
- Regular Exercise: Low-impact aerobic exercise strengthens the heart, making it less prone to the pounding sensations associated with it. Exercise also helps release built-up tension.
- Dietary Awareness: Reducing or eliminating caffeine, found in many beverages, can help break a vicious cycle as it can mimic anxiety symptoms like increased heart rate and sleep disruption.
- Setting Boundaries (“Just Say NO!”): Overcommitting yourself can lead to a build-up of low-level anxiety about multiple tasks, which can be just as overwhelming as intense anxiety about one major issue. Learning to say no is a powerful form of self-care.
Anxiety Management Psychotherapy with Marina Edelman, LMFT
At the practice of Marina Edelman, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Westlake Village, CA, we understand the complexities of anxiety and offer comprehensive and holistic care to help you find lasting relief. Psychotherapy can be instrumental in addressing the root causes, and equipping you with effective coping mechanisms.
- Explore Underlying Causes: Uncover the triggers and experiences that contribute to it, including stressors related to work, family, and past events.
- Examine Thought Patterns and Behaviors: Identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that may be exacerbating your stress levels.
- Gain Self-Understanding and Insight: Develop a deeper awareness of your personal stress triggers and patterns.
- Develop Tailor-Made Coping Strategies: Learn and practice techniques that are specifically suited to your needs and effective for long-term management.
Marina Edelman, LMFT, offers support for a range of anxiety-related issues, including:
- Panic Attacks
- Generalized Worry
- Social
- Nervousness
- Performance
- Shyness
- Sexual
Take the First Step Towards Change
Many clients choose to address stress through couples therapy, where we work directly on the relational patterns driving emotional overload.
Contact Marina Edelman, LMFT, today for a confidential consultation.
Learn More About Marina Edelman’s Services
You can also find more information on her Psychology Today profile: Marina Edelman – Psychology Today. Or explore resources on the AEDP Institute website: Marina Edelman – AEDP Institute
FAQ
Is what I'm experiencing anxiety — or am I just a worrier?
This is one of the most common questions I hear — and it deserves a careful answer, because the cultural tendency to normalize anxiety as “just stress” or “just being a worrier” is one of the primary reasons it goes untreated for years. Worry is a thought. It is a physiological and psychological state — one that involves the nervous system, the body, and deeply ingrained patterns of anticipating and responding to threat. Clinical anxiety is characterized by persistent, excessive fear or worry that is difficult to control, disproportionate to the actual situation, and begins to affect your daily functioning, your relationships, or your quality of life. If anxiety is organizing how you move through the world — what you avoid, what you can’t stop thinking about, what keeps you awake — that is worth addressing clinically, regardless of how long you have been telling yourself it is simply who you are.
What does anxiety actually feel like — and why does it show up so differently in different people?
In my 20+ years of clinical practice, anxiety is one of the most varied presentations I work with — and that variability is part of why it so often goes unrecognized. For some people, it is the relentless mental noise of worry that never fully quiets. For others, it is physical — a tight chest, a churning stomach, chronic tension, or a hypervigilance that keeps the body in a permanent state of low-level alert. For others still, it presents as irritability, difficulty concentrating, sleep disruption, or the compulsive need to control situations and outcomes. It can look like perfectionism. It can look like avoidance. It can look like being perpetually busy. Understanding how anxiety specifically shows up for you is one of the first and most important things we do together — because treating it effectively requires knowing exactly what we are treating.
What therapeutic approaches do you use for anxiety?
My primary approach for anxiety is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — which has the most robust evidence base of any therapeutic method for anxiety disorders and works directly with the thought patterns and behavioral responses that maintain the anxiety cycle. I integrate this with somatic approaches that address the physiological dimension of anxiety — because the body holds it as much as the mind does, and purely cognitive work often isn’t sufficient on its own. Where it has roots in trauma, I bring in EMDR to process the underlying experiences driving the hypervigilance. And where it is significantly affecting relationships, I draw on the Gottman Method and EFT to address the relational dimension. The approach is always built around you specifically — your history, your presentation, and what is most likely to produce lasting relief.
How long does therapy for anxiety typically take?
For situational or mild to moderate anxiety with identifiable triggers, meaningful relief is often achievable within eight to sixteen sessions of consistent work. For generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, or anxiety with deep trauma roots, the timeline is longer — and the work goes deeper. What I want to be honest about is the difference between symptom management and genuine resolution. Many people have learned to manage it well enough to function — but they are still living inside its constraints. The goal of our work together is not simply to cope more effectively. It is to understand what the anxiety is protecting, address that directly, and create a genuine shift in how safe the world feels from the inside.
Can it be treated without medication?
For mild to moderate anxiety, therapy alone is highly effective — and the skills built through evidence-based therapy produce changes that medication alone cannot. For severe anxiety or panic disorder, the combination of therapy and medication is often more effective than either in isolation, and I work collaboratively with psychiatrists and prescribers when that is clinically indicated. I never advocate for or against medication categorically. My goal is always the approach that is most likely to give you real, lasting relief — and that determination is made together, based on an honest clinical picture of where you are and what you need.
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