Licensed Psychologist
You will be asked to practice breathing (called also diaphragmatic breathing), progressive muscle relaxation, ‘tense and release’, visualization exercises among other relaxation techniques. The purpose of these interventions is to teach you to master strategies you can use to control the physiological part of an anxiety attack.
This is a behavioral intervention in which the therapist and client together develop a hierarchy of feared stimuli, with the most stressful or anxiety loaded at the top and the least feared stimuli on the bottom. You will be encouraged to start with the least anxiety provoking event that you can manage and then move upward towards the top of the hierarchy until you are able to work with the most anxiety provoking event in the hierarchy.
Research had found this technique highly effective to help people reduce anxiety and avoidance behaviors
People are taught to tolerate discomfort/anxiety associated with Obsessive Compulsive disorder for brief periods of time while they are helped to reduce the urge leading to compulsions or rituals.
Research on social anxiety consistently found that cognitive behavioral techniques (CBT)are the most effective treatments to reduce avoidance with social anxiety. CBT will target first the maladaptive thoughts patterns and feelings that lead to avoid social situations. The purpose of this intervention is to help the person identify how in a large extent he/she creates his/her own anxieties through irrational thinking.
It is the persistent fear of social or performance situations in which embarrassment may occur; exposure to the situation immediately provokes an anxiety response, resulting in avoidance or enduring the situation with great discomfort; furthermore, the anticipation of facing the social or performance situation interferes with the person daily routine, occupational, social life. You might have specific social anxiety if your discomfort is limited to one or more situations like public speaking or confronting someone in a position of authority. Generalized social anxiety is more pervasive, your fear is present in almost every situations where other people are present.