Mood and Anxiety

Anger

Anger is a normal emotion, but it can become uncontrollable and create problems for you, your family and your personal relationships. Anger can stop you thinking clearly, make you act impulsively, or may make you aggressive and violent towards others.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to feel angry. But it can cause a problem if it becomes a default emotion or, the opposite, an emotion that is completely unexpressed. People may turn their anger inwards rather than outwards – that can cause a lot of stress, mentally but also in the body, leading to physical health issues or even self-harm. This can lead to problems such as:

• eating disorders
• self harm
• drugs
• alcohol addiction

You may feel ashamed or guilty about your anger – therapy can help you find the cause of your anger and provide ways to control and change your behaviour.

Breathing exercises and meditation may help you calm yourself when you feel you’re getting angry. It can sometimes help to channel your anger into something more positive and creative or physical.

Anxiety

Anxiety is common in mental illness or after extreme or distressing experiences. You may feel intense apprehension or worry, accompanied by acute physical signs such as:

• sleeplessness
• rapid heartbeat
• palpitations
• dizziness
• irritability

Therapy can help you with anxiety, panic attacks and phobias by giving you ways of dealing with situations as they occur and exploring the cause of your feelings.

Anxiety stems from our ‘flight or fight’ response. This happens when our body feels as if it’s in danger. Anxiety can show itself in a range of physical signs, such as an increase heart rate, muscle tension, dizziness, sleeplessness, hyperventilating and wanting to use the toilet more. These are caused by the hormones released by the fight or flight response.

You may want to look at ways to break out of a cycle of negative thoughts that are making you anxious. Or you may need to think about whether what is making you anxious is a fact – or something you have imagined (such as the true meaning behind the funny look from your boss).

Breathing exercises can help to regulate your breaths physically, which can have an impact on relaxing your mind as well. Mindfulness techniques, such as meditation, can also have a positive impact for some people.

We start by looking at what’s going on for you. What’s causing these fears? Are there any underlying issues, anything that triggers these feelings of anxiety? We explore the unhelpful thinking patterns that you might be having.

Depression

Depression can be a devastating illness that affects your body, mood, behaviour and thoughts. It is not a sign of weakness or failure, and it’s not something that can be changed overnight. Without treatment, symptoms can be present for years, preventing you from functioning to your full ability.

Everyone has times when they feel low but depression is when you feel this way for weeks or months at a time and it affects your ability to get on with and enjoy your life. As well as low mood, depression symptoms can include feeling very tearful, irritable or angry, losing interest in things you previously enjoyed or feeling tired and having less energy. You may also lose concentration, self-confidence, appetite and motivation. Some of the symptoms are more unexpected such as unexplained aches or pains.

Depression can leave people feeling like they are isolated but at the same time they want to hide away from others. They feel hopeless and think that other people don’t like them.

Emotional distress

Sometimes simply sitting down with someone who can help you put your feelings into perspective can be beneficial. In counselling, you can explore personal difficulties or feelings of dissatisfaction, and talk openly about aspects of your life, in a way that may not be possible with friends or family. Therapy can help you discover what is important to you, so you can live the kind of life you really want and improve your health and wellbeing.

Health anxiety

Therapy can help anyone who is generally worried about their health, or who needs help in coming to terms with being diagnosed with illness. Working through feelings such as ‘why me?’ can be beneficial to your quality of life.

Health anxiety or illness anxiety happens when a person interprets physical symptoms in their body as a sign of disease or when a person experiences an exceptional amount of worry they may develop a serious illness although symptoms may not actually be happening. Rather than the symptoms causing pain, it’s actually the anxiety causing a stressful situation for the person.

You may have health anxiety if you’re constantly worrying about your health and regularly check yourself for signs of illness. Other signs can include compulsively searching for health-related topics online or in the media, worrying that health professionals or medical tests missed something, or seeking regular reassurance you’re not ill.

Calming and relaxation techniques are an important part of coping with any form of anxiety and should be practiced regularly. Firstly, these techniques interrupt and break the habit of the worry” Secondly, they feel good and calm the nervous system. Understanding what soothes is the first step. It might be a simple activity such as doing something creative, having a bath or reading a book.

The use of repeated mantras, positive affirmations and mental, physical or sensory grounding techniques, such as counting how many coloured objects you can see, listening to a favourite song or mindfully exploring a favourite object can also distract the mind from rumination about the body, and promote relaxation and a more hopeful mindset.

Self-harm

Self-harm can be a way of coping with painful and difficult feelings and distress. You may harm yourself because you feel overwhelmed and don’t know how else to deal with things. Therapy may help you discover and deal with the feelings that are causing you to self-harm.

People self-harm in different ways and it can be a minor or high-risk action or behaviour which causes harm.

We can see other forms of self-harm that involve unhealthy choices or behaviours, such as risk-taking activities, destructive relationships, food, alcohol and drug abuse.

Self-harm can be a means to manage uncontrollable emotions and there are often complex feelings to be unravelled when helping people understand their self-harming behaviour.

Through therapy we can start to explore the feelings around the self-harm and try to name some of the experiences the person will be feeling. It’s through this process that we’ll hope to provide relief from the immediate distress and then to increase self-understanding of the underlying issues for the damaging behaviours. In understanding these, we can develop healthier ways to manage feelings.

Social anxiety 

Social anxiety is a type of anxiety that relates to social situations. It can affect people when they talk to others – not just in large gatherings, but also when they’re meeting new people at work or school. It can also affect one-to-one conversations and is sometimes called social anxiety disorder or social phobia.

Social anxiety is about being afraid of how others perceive you and of people judging you. There’s a fear of being embarrassed or saying something wrong in front of other people. These thoughts spiral and create anxiety.

If you have social anxiety, you may worry about conversations, meetings and interactions before, during and after they happen. It’s more than being shy, it’s something that can completely overwhelm you. It can have an impact on your friendships at work or in education and affect your ability to do everyday activities, such as shopping.

It can also give you physical symptoms, such as feeling sick, clammy, nauseous or sweaty. It might increase your heart rate or give you panic attacks. 

During the course of the pandemic, some people were worried about socialising following months of limited social contact due to lockdown restrictions. The term ‘re-entry anxiety’ describes the impact these fears are having on people, and that covers social anxiety too.

Stress

Stress can be a positive thing and help you achieve your goals but too much stress can put your health at risk and lead to physical, mental and emotional problems. Therapy could help you to manage your life differently or support you in developing coping strategies.

Stress is an adverse reaction we have to excessive pressure or other situations we face in our lives. It can leave us feeling overwhelmed or overloaded by the demands placed upon us.

It may be a response to the feeling that we have more work to do than we can fit into our working day, or it could be related to worries about finances, relationships or a change in our circumstances, such as moving house.

Causes can include a time of uncertainty or change, being under a lot of pressure, not being in control of or worrying about something, or responsibility that is hard to cope with.

Our bodies release the stress hormone cortisol when we feel threatened, scared or under pressure. When the situation is resolved our hormone levels return to normal. This increase in cortisol can affect us physically, mentally, emotionally and behaviourally. Symptoms can include raised blood pressure, headaches, tension and muscular pain, concentration difficulties, difficulty making decisions, moodiness, irritability and loss of confidence.

There are may ways we can help to alleviate stress:

• Exercise is one of them – whether that’s going for a run, swim, playing sport or even getting off the bus a stop earlier and walking the rest of the way to work.
• Breathing exercises, meditation, yoga and tai chi can help you to relax and reduce stress as well.
• Mindfulness gives you the tools to focus on being in the moment, not worrying about the past or the future. It relaxes and revives you, calms your body and mind and enables clearer thinking

Suicidal feelings

Many kinds of emotional pain can lead to thoughts of suicide. You may reach a point at which you feel you can no longer cope. You may not truly wish to die, but you may need help at that moment. Therapy could help by allowing you to share your thoughts and feelings and work on ways to transform negative thoughts into more positive ones.

Trauma

Emotional and psychological trauma can be the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, and make you feel helpless and vulnerable in a dangerous world. Emotional and psychological trauma result from stressful events that you experience or witness that crush your sense of security and may make you feel helpless and vulnerable. Trauma can be caused by a one-off event, such as a bad accident, a natural disaster or a violent attack, or from more prolonged or sustained violence or abuse over many years. Talking to a therapist could help you.

Trauma may express itself in the following ways:

• Intrusive thoughts and images – What happened 20 years ago still feels like it’s happening today. You might experience a flashback, which is like a waking nightmare, or indeed disturbed sleep.
• Hyper-arousal – A rollercoaster of emotions. Suddenly waking up feeling intense fear or you’re doing something in the day and you suddenly get a waft of intense anxiety.
• Avoiding triggers – If you have had a car accident for example, you may not get into a car and avoid activities that might involve the possibility of being in a car.