A Practical Guide To Rapid Anxiety Treatment

A Guide to Rapid Anxiety Treatment: What Actually Helps?

When anxiety starts making decisions for you, life can become smaller surprisingly quickly. You cancel things you actually want to do, avoid phone calls or situations, check and recheck, struggle to sleep, overthink conversations or find yourself constantly waiting for the next wave of anxiety or panic.

Quite often, you know perfectly well that your reaction does not make sense. You know the meeting is probably going to be fine, that the plane is safe, that the physical sensation you have noticed is unlikely to mean anything terrible, or that the intrusive thought going through your mind is just a thought.

But knowing that does not necessarily stop the reaction.

That is because anxiety is not simply a thinking problem. It is a protective response that has become over-sensitive. Your brain has learned to associate something with danger and can trigger the anxiety response before you have had a chance to think logically about what is actually happening.

This is also why reassurance can help for a little while but often does not solve the problem.

Rapid anxiety treatment is about identifying that pattern and changing the response that is keeping it going. It does not mean rushing therapy, ignoring your history or promising that everyone can be “fixed” in one session. It means being focused on the problem you actually want to change rather than assuming therapy has to continue indefinitely.

What does rapid anxiety treatment actually mean?

People sometimes assume that if they have had anxiety for years, it must take years to resolve. That is not necessarily the case.

How long a problem has been there and how long it takes to change are two different things.

Some anxiety problems are very specific. You may be completely confident in most areas of your life but panic when you have to present at work. You may avoid motorways, flying, lifts, crowded places or medical appointments. You may become anxious about a particular bodily sensation or find yourself trapped in a cycle of intrusive thoughts, checking or reassurance seeking.

In those situations there is often a very clear pattern to work with.

Other anxiety is more complex. It may be tied into trauma, OCD, long-standing beliefs about yourself, burnout, loss of confidence or a number of experiences that have accumulated over time. That may need more work, but it still does not mean therapy needs to become an endless examination of everything that has ever happened to you.

For me, the important question is not simply, “Do you feel less anxious?”

It is: what can you do now that anxiety was stopping you from doing before?

Can you get on the plane? Go into the meeting? Make the phone call? Stop checking? Sleep without running everything through your mind? Notice a sensation in your body without immediately assuming the worst?

That is meaningful change.

Why can’t I just think my way out of anxiety?

This is one of the things I hear most often.

“I know it’s ridiculous, but…”

“I know nothing bad is going to happen, but…”

“I know it’s only a thought, but…”

The problem is that the anxious response can happen before conscious thought has really entered the equation.

Something triggers your brain's threat system and your body responds. Your heart races, your breathing changes, your stomach turns, your muscles tighten and your thoughts speed up. You may feel an overwhelming urge to get away, check something, seek reassurance or somehow make yourself feel safe.

Then, quite naturally, you do whatever reduces the anxiety.

You avoid the situation.

You cancel.

You check again.

You ask someone to reassure you.

You leave.

And you feel better.

Unfortunately, your brain can learn from that relief: Good job we got out of there. That must have been dangerous.

So next time it produces the anxiety response even faster.

This is why avoidance brings short-term relief but can make anxiety worse in the longer term.

Over time you can find yourself organising more and more of your life around avoiding anxiety.

Understanding why you developed anxiety can certainly be helpful. Sometimes there is an obvious event or period in your life that explains it.

But insight does not automatically change the response.

You can completely understand where a problem came from and still have exactly the same reaction.

If you have reached the point where you think, I know why I do this; I just want to stop doing it, a more focused approach can be very useful.

What are the options for treating anxiety?

There is no one therapy that is right for every person or every anxiety problem.

What matters is finding an approach that fits the way your anxiety works, the severity of it, your history and what you actually want to achieve.

CBT

Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is probably the best-known psychological treatment for anxiety.

It looks at the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviour and can help you recognise anxious thinking, challenge predictions and gradually stop avoiding things that frighten you.

For many people it is extremely useful.

There are also people who tell me that they already know their thinking is irrational. They can challenge the thought perfectly well, but the feeling still arrives.

That is where approaches which work more directly with the automatic response may be worth considering.

Medication

Medication can also be helpful, particularly where anxiety has become severe enough to affect sleep, appetite, work or everyday functioning.

For some people medication reduces the intensity of the symptoms enough to make psychological therapy much easier.

It is not necessarily a choice between medication and therapy. They can be used together, and any decision about starting, changing or stopping prescribed medication should be discussed with your GP or another qualified prescriber.

Using BWRT for anxiety

BrainWorking Recursive Therapy, usually shortened to BWRT, is the approach I use most often for anxiety.

One of the reasons I like working with it is that it focuses on the response you are experiencing now rather than requiring you to spend session after session talking about the problem.

Think about what happens with anxiety.

You encounter something — a thought, memory, situation, image or physical sensation — and the reaction seems to arrive almost instantly.

You do not consciously decide to panic.

You do not decide that today would be a good day to have an anxiety attack.

The response simply happens.

BWRT is designed to work with those automatic responses.

We identify what happens now and, importantly, how you would prefer to respond instead.

You do not have to tell me every detail of something traumatic that happened to you. I need enough information to understand what we are working with, but BWRT does not require you to repeatedly relive painful experiences in order to change your response to them.

For someone with anxiety, the change might be that they can go into a previously difficult situation without panic. They may stop feeling compelled to avoid something, find that persistent overthinking has quietened down, or notice that an intrusive thought no longer produces the same emotional reaction.

Sometimes that change happens quickly.

Of course, nobody can responsibly tell you exactly how many sessions you will need without first understanding the problem. A straightforward fear and complex anxiety linked with trauma or OCD are not the same thing.

But I also do not believe therapy needs to continue simply because it has always been assumed that anxiety takes a long time to change.

What happens when you come to see me?

The first thing I want to understand is what is actually happening to you.

Not simply, “I have anxiety.”

When does it happen?

What sets it off?

What happens in your body?

What goes through your mind?

What do you do when it happens?

What are you now avoiding because of it?

And when did this pattern start?

I am also interested in what was happening around the time it began. Sometimes that gives us an important clue about what the brain originally learned.

If something has been there for as long as you can remember, we can look at your earliest memory of feeling that way and the experiences that have had the greatest impact.

But the aim is not to spend weeks collecting your life history.

I want to understand the pattern well enough to know what needs to change.

Just as importantly, I want to know what you want instead.

If the anxiety disappeared tomorrow, what would be different?

What would you do?

Where would you go?

How would you behave?

What would you stop worrying about?

That gives us something real to work towards.

What does improvement actually feel like?

People often expect successful therapy to produce some dramatic moment where they suddenly feel completely different.

Sometimes the change is obvious.

But quite often it is much less dramatic than that.

You simply find yourself doing something.

You drive somewhere and afterwards realise you never thought about being anxious.

You sit through the meeting without monitoring your heart.

You notice the thought but do not need to analyse it.

You stop asking for reassurance.

You realise you have not checked something for three days.

You sleep.

One of the nicest things clients sometimes say to me is, “I actually forgot it used to bother me.”

That is what we are looking for.

Not constantly managing anxiety more successfully, but reaching the point where it is no longer running the show.

When should you get help with anxiety?

You do not need to wait until anxiety has reached crisis point.

If it is affecting your work, relationships, sleep, confidence, travel or stopping you doing things you want to do, it is worth doing something about it.

The same applies if you have become trapped in repeated cycles of panic, checking, reassurance seeking, avoidance or intrusive thoughts.

The longer we avoid something because it makes us anxious, the more convincing the anxiety can become.

But learned patterns can change.

If you are experiencing thoughts of harming yourself, feel unable to keep yourself safe or believe you are in immediate danger, please seek urgent help through emergency services, A&E or NHS urgent mental health services. Focused therapy such as BWRT is not a substitute for emergency mental health care.

Choosing someone to help with anxiety

If you are already anxious, trying to choose a therapist from hundreds of websites can be overwhelming in itself.

You do not need to understand every therapy before you make contact.

Look at the person.

Do they have appropriate training?

Do they regularly work with the problem you have?

Can they explain how they work in language you understand?

Do they seem interested in understanding your anxiety rather than simply putting you through a standard process?

And do you feel comfortable talking to them?

I also think you should be wary of anyone promising to cure every problem in a single session.

I have seen anxiety change remarkably quickly, but people are individuals and therapy should reflect that.

I am an accredited BWRT Level 3 practitioner and work with adults in Edinburgh and online across the UK with anxiety, panic, intrusive thoughts, trauma, fears and other patterns that can keep people stuck.

My approach is straightforward. I want to understand what is happening, identify what is keeping it going and work on changing it.

You do not need to become better at living with anxiety if the anxiety itself can change.

And sometimes it can change much more quickly than you think.

If you would like to talk things through booka free consultation.