Dr. Robert Schachter

Licensed New York Psychologist NYC

Cognitive Therapy for Quick Results

Assistant Clinical Professor Mount Sinai School of Medicine

(212) 308-1666 Call Now

Generalized anxiety symptoms & treatment

How can I overcome anxiety?

Anxiety feels terrible, but it is easily treatable. I have a high success rate treating anxiety, and I understand it. I know what it feels like when you wake up and feel tightness in your chest thinking about the coming day. I understand what it’s like when you have to give a talk in front of a group or make a presentation and break out in a sweat, or when you go to a party and want to disappear when you don’t know what to say. These are all different kinds of anxiety. Anxiety affects over 18% of the population, and I have been treating it successfully for many years. I can help you. With my Cognitive Therapy approach I will teach you a set of practical skills to stop the anxiety.

Anxiety is not always bad. It is an adaptive response to help us survive. When it works properly, it is a warning alarm to tell us there is a problem or danger. The discomfort of the anxiety actually pushes us to handle the problem. When we start to do something about it, the anxiety usually subsides.

Some people are wired more for anxiety than others. For those individuals, they feel anxiety when there is no danger or specific problem. They have false alarms. I teach a number of very effective techniques to stop the false alarms.

The following are types of anxiety I can help with.

Generalized anxiety symptoms

  • Excessive worry, occurring more days than not, for a least six months?
  • Unreasonable worry about a number of events or activities, such as work or school and/or health?
  • The inability to control the worry?
  • Restlessness, feeling keyed-up or on edge?
  • Being easily tired
  • Problems concentrating
  • Irritability
  • Muscle tension
  • Trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, or restless and unsatisfying sleep
  • Anxiety interferes with daily life
  • Social Anxiety

Treating general anxiety

The way we feel is based on how we perceive a situation. If we are anxious, however, we view the situation through symptoms of anxiety that are not realistic. Treating anxiety involves teaching how to identify and replace thoughts that are distorted with ones that are more realistic. It also entails learning how to challenge anxiety provoking situations with new behaviors.

So many of our responses are habitual. Once you learn an anxious response, that action occurs automatically without your thinking about it. If you are anxious, you know that you are often very uncomfortable. You think of the worst consequence in any situation and your actions are often based on the assumption that something will go wrong or something bad will happen.

When you look at events retrospectively, however, you find that most of what you had feared never occurred, and you had suffered for nothing, The fear of having a brain tumor because of the bad headache you had turned out to be just clogged sinuses.

We start the treatment of anxiety with a full evaluation to understand how the symptoms fit into the full picture of who you are from a psycho-physiological, a psychological and a systems viewpoint. Once you put all the factors of who you are and what you have been through on the table, the symptoms always make perfect sense.

Then we find the treatment plan to solve the problem in the most direct way and shortest time. We start by teaching you the skills of using Cognitive Therapy to change patterns of thought that are not 100% realistic. With Cognitive Therapy you learn spot the thought that underlies the feeling. You then follow a simple procedure to determine if the thought is realistic. If it is not, you replace it with one that is based totally on reality. Within a short time, you are able to do this spontaneously, and your anxiety decreases measurably.

The process involves looking the patterns you use and replacing them with more effective ones that don’t include anxiety. You will be asked to do homework that helps in the changing of these patterns. Change occurs within a relatively short time.

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