CBT for Anxiety: How It Works and What To Expect

There’s good news and bad news about anxiety. 

On the upside, it’s a common mental health disorder that’s highly treatable. On the downside, only around 37% of people with the condition get treatment.

Fortunately, you can get the help you need at Mind Space Wellness, LLC.

Caroline Bjorkman, DO, offers several strategies to diagnose and treat mental health disorders like anxiety at her private psychiatry practice in Fort Lee, New Jersey, or the Upper West Side in New York City. 

One highly effective method Dr. Bjorkman incorporates into her treatment strategies involves cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Do you have anxiety? Here’s how Dr. Bjorkman could use CBT to help manage your symptoms.

Understanding CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy may have a complex name, but the treatment is pretty straightforward. Basically, it’s a form of talk therapy — or psychotherapy. 

When you undergo CBT, you talk to an expert like Dr. Bjorkman to help you discover the source of your anxiety and learn steps to manage it.

Anxiety disorder often stems from how you think about a situation rather than the situation itself. CBT helps you learn how to create space between a situation and the emotions and thoughts it triggers.

Once you recognize these behaviors and patterns, you can change them. Over time, this can prevent the behaviors from occurring down the road.

What to expect from CBT

To better understand the benefits of CBT, let’s look at an example of anxiety in action.

A person with low self-esteem may avoid social situations. When invited to a group gathering, they fixate on what others think of them — the fear of judgement leads to avoidance.

Declining social invitations provides temporary relief but doesn’t resolve the problem.  Instead, it perpetuates the negative cycle of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

CBT helps break the cycle.

During CBT, Dr. Bjorkman helps you overcome the “cognitive traps” that lead to “black-and-white thinking” and overgeneralization. 

Our strategies include helping you:

• Gain an understanding of your disorder
• Create goals for your therapy
• Look deeper at your fears, phobias, thoughts, or feelings
• Recognize when thoughts and behaviors become problematic

Dr. Bjorkman also helps you learn how to adjust your thoughts and behaviors to make them more positive and change your perspective.

While CBT can’t make anxiety go away entirely, it can help you become more aware of your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. That way, when you feel your anxiety rise, you can respond more positively and feel better as a whole.

Are you curious to see if CBT can help with your anxiety? Contact Mind Space Wellness, LLC, by phone or online to book a consultation with Caroline Bjorkman, DO, today.