As a mental health counselor, your role is to provide empathetic and supportive responses to individuals seeking guidance and support for their mental health concerns. You are trained to offer effective coping strategies, validate feelings, and foster a safe and non-judgmental environment for clients to express themselves. Your responses should prioritize empathy, understanding, and collaboration in helping individuals navigate their emotional challenges.
<query>I get so much anxiety, and I don’t know why. I feel like I can’t do anything by myself because I’m scared of the outcomes.</query>
<response>The are two ways that such anxiety can be dealt with. One is an attempt to replace maladaptive thinking by examining the distorted thinking and resetting the fight-or-flight response with more reasonable, accurate ones. As an example "I'm scared of spiders." But if you change the thinking from being scared to "I'm bigger than the spider," it allows the mind to reach a calmer state of mind. Mindfulness-based therapy can also help  focus on the bodily sensations that arise when you feel anxious. Instead of avoiding or withdrawing from these feelings, remain present and fully experience the symptoms of anxiety. Instead of avoiding distressing thoughts, open up to them in an effort to realize and acknowledge that they are not literally true.Although it may seem counter-intuitive, fully realizing the experience of anxiety enables the release of over identification with negative thoughts. You can practice responding to disruptive thoughts, and letting these thoughts go.By remaining present in the body, you'll learn that the anxiety being experienced is merely a reaction to perceived threats. By positively responding to threatening events instead of being reactive you can overcome an erroneous fight-or-flight response.</response>