Anxiety Treatment Centers
in Los Angeles

Picture a pressure cooker which you continue to fill with unwanted feelings and painful memories. This pressure cooker through the years has slowly built up steam to the point that the steam is causing the pot to rock back and forth on the stove with intense pressure.

This is the birthplace of anxiety. Many of you take the painful experiences and situations in your life that cause discomfort and place them away hoping that out of sight/out of mind would work.  Alas, what happens is both emotional and physical.

Tightness of your chest, sweaty palms, heart palpitations, racing thoughts, obessessive thoughts, avoidance of social situations, anticipation of disasterous outcomes based on only your thougts cause you to become debilitated by your anxiety.

Trembling. Heart palpitations. Muscle tension. Overwhelming feelings of worry. Hyperventilation.  Shaking. Restlessness. Fatigue. Insomnia. Being on edge. Shortness of breath. Sweating. A sense of impending doom. 

Sound familiar?

Those are among the many, many symptoms of anxiety disorder and according to statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), almost 20% of adults will have suffered from one in the past year.

That’s nearly 1 in 5 Americans.

Just under 1/3rd of U.S. adults will experience an anxiety disorder of some kind in their lifetimes.

Living with it becomes an increasingly lonely and isolating existence with unchecked anxiety pulling you further and further away from the people, places and activities you love most in order to avoid the onset of overwhelming and debilitating symptoms.

Complicating matters even further is that anxiety is actually a thoroughly normal and human emotion in reaction to a stressful situation. Feeling anxious or nervous serves a purpose in that sense and is something that everyone experiences to some degree. To a certain extent, this may be why anxiety disorders are less likely to be taken as seriously as they should be initially.

Let’s be clear about one thing though; nervousness isn’t anxiety. It’s easy for people to brush aside and dismiss what you’re going through in the moment as just being nervous, but an anxiety disorder and a bout of nervousness are far from the same.

Anxiety disorders don’t just go away when the stress goes away, they’re chronic in nature and it’s when these feelings go unchecked and become impossible to control that an issue arises. 

It’s largely for this reason that people seek a way to cope in the form of substances.

You need a way out of the ceaseless discomfort and unrest that anxiety brings.

As the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) notes, “data show high rates of comorbid substance use disorders and anxiety disorders—which include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)”.

Numerous studies over the years have confirmed this over and over again, with one summarizing the findings as such; “decades of research in psychiatry have shown that anxiety disorders and substance use disorders co-occur at greater rates than would be expected by chance alone”.

In addition to the 3 disorders listed by NIDA, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and social phobia, or social anxiety disorder, also fall under the umbrella of anxiety disorder.

While it may initially feel like substances are freeing you from anxiety and allowing you to live some version of a normal life; prolonged self-medication leads you down a steadily more dangerous path.

The more drugs you use or alcohol you drink, the greater your tolerance becomes. The greater your tolerance becomes, the more you have to take to feel “normal” and as this pattern continues unchecked, the stakes get higher with overdose and potentially fatal outcomes becoming possible the longer the cycle lasts.

This co-occurrence of complicated and dire disorders is known as a dual diagnosis and requires a specialized type of treatment that truly heals the whole of you because addressing anxiety without delving into substance abuse or substance abuse without touching upon anxiety is a recipe for relapse.

Look at it this way, if for example your drug abuse or alcoholism is related to trauma in childhood and metastasizes into post-traumatic stress disorder, going to rehab solely for addiction isn’t likely to get the job done in the long run. Why? Because you haven’t faced or worked through the underlying issues that led you to substances in the first place: anxiety disorder.

This is where dual diagnosis anxiety treatment in California can work wonders.