Anxiety Therapy | Boulder, CO

Takeaway: Anxiety can make it difficult to embody our authentic selves. Thankfully, working with a trusted anxiety therapist in Boulder, CO can help you get grounded and learn how to trust your inner wisdom. Reach out today to learn more about how we can help.

Struggling with anxiety on a daily basis can make doing everyday things feel impossible. Simple things, like going to the grocery store and spending time with friends feels overwhelming, and making bigger decisions, like changes in your career or moving, feel scary, blurry, and unclear. Often, when we are anxious, we are disconnected from our soul essence, and we are trapped in our own deep fears of mistrust and self-doubt, and our nervous system is responding to this story.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Working with a therapist that understands the roots of where anxiety stems from and has a map for how to develop skills, make positive changes, and reduce symptoms can allow you to live a much more calm, happy, and more grounded life.

Read more below about how anxiety therapists can help you transform your life, relationships, work, and joy.

Does this sound like you?

You've tried deep breathing, meditating, telling yourself your thoughts aren't real, and scouring youtube for self-help videos. You know there is no reason to be anxious, but you often wake up with a feeling in your heart and gut that something doesn't feel right. And it all starts to spiral from there. Your thoughts go from zero to a hundred, and even when you manage to calm yourself down, you become scared you'll get anxious again. And boom. Like clockwork, you do.

When you're anxious, your body can feel ungrounded and flighty, almost like it's buzzing or too exposed. Sometimes you feel unsafe, get an upset stomach, have intrusive thoughts, worry constantly, get headaches, or find yourself stressed out for hours. Stress, fear, depression, and impending doom all intermittently cycle through your space. Self-care can feel tricky to incorporate because your severe anxiety overpowers your positive thoughts.

People that struggle with anxiety often struggle with:

relationship problems
feeling overwhelmed
feeling stuck
overwhelming fear
separation anxiety
physical health
panic attacks
executive functioning

Additionally, in all of the uncertainty of today's climate struggles and the huge shifts in technology, many teenagers and young adults experience overwhelming anxiety when they wonder how they will be able to transition successfully into adults and support themselves financially and emotionally.

Although we can't predict the future or know every step, it is possible to live life without an anxiety disorder driving your thoughts, emotions, physical health, and daily choices. You deserve the freedom to be your authentic self.

Anxiety therapy in Boulder can help you break free from the patterns that hold you back.

Anxiety disorders can often be simplified as "what if" disorders, meaning your brain races a million miles ahead trying to populate every possible (and often negative) outcome. Although this type of planning or consideration could be helpful, it often sabotages our ability to move forward by freezing us into fight, flight, or freeze mode. And this can domino into panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mood disorders if combined with other mental health challenges.

Good anxiety treatment is often a blend of several modalities, such as exposure therapy, body-centered/somatic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness. When we address the huge connection between our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, and understand how they all inform and communicate with one another, we begin to see how easy it is for one thought to go from 0-60.

If you think you have generalized anxiety disorder or "GAD," it's important to connect with a mental health professional to discuss your symptoms. Due to the huge influx of people sharing their mental health experiences on social media platforms, there are pop culture-based misconceptions about how to treat and heal anxiety disorders, panic attacks, high stress, trauma, and social anxiety challenges.

Meet Xandra Hawes | Holistic anxiety therapist in Boulder, CO

As a person that struggled with anxiety and panic attacks as a child and young adult, I know first hand how overwhelming anxiety feels in the body, and how it can cause severe self-doubt and overwhelm. Growing up as a sensitive person and empath, anxiety felt like part of my personality, and I struggled to unplug from obsessive worrying and the deep fear of not feeling enough.

In high school, I began working with a psychotherapist and psychic-medium, which allowed me to holistically heal my mind, body and spirit. Not only did I completely move past the daily anxiety I experienced, but I learned how to let go of perfectionistic thinking and became empowered in my intuition.

Due to my positive experiences receiving treatment from both psychology and spirituality professionals, I believe good anxiety treatment addresses your mind, body, and soul. Working with a mental health professional that specializes in treating anxiety will allow you to process your fears, doubts, and heavy emotions while also helping you reconnect back into your best self. An anxiety therapist will also teach you new skills to reduce anxiety and create a structured plan of action to get you back on your best path.

Learn more about how we can do that together below.

Our approach to anxiety treatment

Our approach to treating anxiety begins with creating a heart map. We discuss and write down where you would love to be and how you imagine life could be if you were free from anxious thoughts, excessive worry, daily overwhelm, and more. We use this map as a way to hold your higher vision together, and to also bring in a deeper knowing and clarity that you are worthy and deserving of the new life you seek.

Next, we process how anxiety uniquely shows up in your thoughts, emotions, and body, and the impacts it has on your day-to-day life. Anxiety can change over time, and sometimes it lies dormant for a long time until a life transition occurs (I.E big life events) that impacts our ability to exist in the same way.

Here are some of the therapeutic modalities we use in our practice:

Exposure Therapy

When we avoid feeling anxious, we often engage in behavior that ultimately makes us feel bad, shameful, or unpowerful. Engaging in the cycle of avoidance each time we feel anxious results in more negative self-talk, feelings of inadequacy, and powerlessness. Using exposure therapy with a licensed therapist is a research-backed treatment that has been shown to help clients lean into anxiety and overcome it.

Talk therapy

Speaking your thoughts outloud allows you to increase your awareness of your internal dialogue and might include Contemplative Psychotherapy, Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).

Mindfulness practices

Mindfulness awareness practices are hugely beneficial to helping you develop the ability to disrupt, pause and release old patterns and loops that keep you locked in a cycle of overwhelm and suffering.

Meditation

Developing a meditation practice with an anxiety therapist can help you recognize when you jump into "what if" mode and fast forward into the future, often negatively impacting your ability to resource yourself in the present time.

Energy work & somatic grounding practices

Becoming familiar with your energy body and learning how to regulate and ground your nervous system can be hugely beneficial in calming a panic attack and grounding you into the present moment. Anxiety often stems from jumping into the future or past, and taking care of your body in the present time can bring you back into a grounded, trusting space. Also, learning where you hold stress, tension, and worry in your body can help us make a map of where blockages hold you back from your full freedom and integration of your best self.

Guided meditations

Guided imagery and using the right brain to tap into emotions and different parts of our conscious and unconscious mind can result in the processing and releasing of stored patterns in our nervous system, muscles, organs, and chakras.

Who our anxiety therapy offerings are for

We specialize in working with people that are sensitive, empathic, and intuitive and that struggle with anxiety and panic attacks, as well as stress, trauma, difficulty in relationships, and other anxiety-based symptoms.

Sensitive people aka HSPs

Highly sensitive people often feel like life is on steroids. This can cause social anxiety, fear of groups and crowds, avoidance of certain places, and more. For HSPs, lights, sounds, colors, textures and even technology-based objects that emit EMFs and other frequencies can be overwhelming, ungrounding, and cause headaches. Learning how your environment impacts you at a higher level and how to regulate your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in response to it can be life-changing.

Empaths

Empaths feel the emotional fluctuations within their environment, and this can be a huge challenge to not taking on the emotions of others. The key to being an empowered empath is learning how to regulate your own emotional field, and learning specific skills and strategies to let energy go that isn't yours.

FAQs about therapy for anxiety in Boulder

When should I see a therapist for anxiety?

Deciding when to seek help for anxiety is a very personal choice, but there are common symptoms that indicate when anxiety is severely impacting daily functioning, and working with mental health professionals can vastly increase your chances of eradicating negative symptoms.

There are several types of anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and various phobia-related disorders. To learn more about the different types and symptoms, click here.

You are welcome to schedule a free consultation call if you're interested in discussing your unique experience with a clinician, whether or not you have all the symptoms for a formal anxiety disorder diagnosis.

Is therapy worth it for anxiety?

Anxiety has become incredibly common in our world and is one of the top reasons that new clients seek therapy. Because anxiety stems from our thoughts, working with a trained professional to unpack unhelpful thought patterns and to learn how they impact the nervous system can bring clarity, ease, and awareness that disrupts this cycle. Addressing the roots of where anxiety stems can also begin to heal other mental health challenges, such as depression and trauma, and also positively impact children, loved ones, family members, friendships, and more. Learning how to not only cope with the symptoms of anxiety but build new neural pathways and behaviors that combat anxiety can be life-changing.

Which therapy is best for anxiety?

Treatment for anxiety is vast, but some of the modalities that are best known for being evidence-based are exposure therapy, ocd unstuck therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Overall, working with a professional that can attune to you and weave a treatment plan that is individualized to your goals is the best road to take.

Anxiety therapy in Boulder, CO can help you find your path toward peace.

We are absolutely here to support your mind, body, and soul on this journey. You deserve healing and to live a life filled with purpose, joy, confidence, and self-trust.

Get started today with a free 30-minute consultation call.