5 Ways Therapy Can Help You Manage Coronavirus Anxiety

So much has changed in our lives and there’s still uncertainty regarding aspects of our future.  For instance, when will this pandemic end?  When can we safely go back to our lives? 

While we wait on these answers, and therefore a return to some sense of normalcy, many of us are enduring significant anxiety.  Let’s take a look at some ways that therapy can help you manage this anxiety.

1. Feeling Heard and Supported

When you’re struggling with mounting anxiety, it’s so challenging to live your best life.  When you have a therapist to listen closely to your stresses and difficulties, empathize with you, and help support you through it all, it reduces the intensity of your anxiety.

2. Eliminating Really Intense Symptoms

It’s often very challenging to remove extremely unpleasant symptoms without a therapist’s help.  For instance, perhaps you are enduring obsessive, negative thoughts and worries that are impeding your ability to live a peaceful and happy life.  

Therapy can help you understand the causes of these severe difficulties, discover and practice healthy solutions to them, and ensure they are removed from your life. 

3. Reframing this as an Opportunity 

Our brains tend to gravitate towards the negative, so it’s often easiest for us to view this current hardship as solely a damaging light.  A therapist can help you step outside of that perspective to see that now, you have much more time than ever to do all sorts of things you have always wanted to do. Previously, you had work and other constant demands of life (some too many of which are now on hold).  So, a therapist can help you practice seeing this as a chance to do many of these activities, and help you hold yourself accountable for participating in them.

4. Improving Your Patience and Self-Compassion

Everyone has different strengths and areas of the desired improvement, so it makes sense that we all have different capacities to navigate this anxious time.  Therapy can help you notice how you’re treating yourself with regard to moving forward through this process, as well as improving your ability to be patient and kind towards yourself.  This, in turn, can facilitate the ease with which you continue to march forwards. 

5. Increasing Your Ability to See Reality 

When we’re stuck in any type of crisis, we’re much more vulnerable to losing sight of reality; we become prone to forgetting evidence-based thinking, and instead, get lost and overwhelmed in emotional thoughts.  

Therapy can help you calm your intense emotions, which makes it much easier for you to notice and better concentrate on healthier, evidence-based thinking. For example, a therapist can help you first reduce the intensity of your emotions, and then reflect upon and highlight how you previously survived another immensely challenging time in your life.  

Through this process, you can better remember that you have the ability to conquer challenges, and you can do so again now.

I can assist you in alleviating your anxiety throughout this stressful time in a telehealth session through a HIPAA compliant video or phone session. 

Give me a call and we'll discuss how I can help.  Jordan Zipkin, LMFT, at 954-391-5305.