Carrasco Psychological Health Services

One of the common anxiety disorder that therapists treat is generalized anxiety disorder. This is often characterized by having difficulty controlling your worrying and worrying about various different things.

What caused this worry? Well it could be various things. Typically, I do a clinical interview with people to better understand their worry and identify stressors. The possible causes can be genetics. It could be that people have a long family history of anxiety. It seems that if many people in the family are anxious then the patient will also have a tendency to struggle with anxiety. Also, the worry can be due to various environmental factors. People often describe trauma and stressful events such as abuse, the death of a loved one, divorce, and changing jobs or schools that contribute to developing anxiety disorders or generalized anxiety disorder. The condition can also worsen when stress feels out of hand. If a person is using substances, then it is likely that their anxiety can be affected. For example, the use or withdrawal from substances like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine can also worsen anxiety. Again, the idea is that you can begin to identify more of what could be causing your overthinking or worry as you talk more about it in therapy.

Now what to do about it? One of the things I often let people know is that you cannot just stop your mind or your thoughts. Many people will often say just stop thinking about it. This is usually not effective for people because your mind is not really like a light switch, you cannot just switch it off. Thus, the idea is that you can take different approaches to dealing with thoughts. One possible thing is to be begin evaluating the thought that your having. You can begin questioning the thoughts you are having. I often have patients ask themselves “what is the likelihood that could happen?”. Patients usually respond that the actual likelihood of something bad happening is pretty low. For example, you can have worry about what people may think of you. We explore this is therapy and I have people ask themselves, well if someone did think negatively of you, what is the likelihood that you will eventually be ok? Often times, we begin to think that we would never recover from the worst case scenario that we are thinking about.

In summary, this the information on what could be going on and possible methods to manage your worry. Again, this is based on the information provided so I recommend really talking to a therapist if you are interested in getting more accurate about what could occurring and treatment options.