Conquering Anxiety, with Dr. Joy

(bright gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace" and to Friday. Today is my last day with you all, and I wanna thank you so much for having me as your guest host this week. Today we're wrapping up with probably the most relatable topic in the mental health realm, anxiety. I've got it, you've got it, we've all got it. Whether it's social, situational, or chronic, feelings of anxiety can be crippling and even life altering, but it's a natural human reaction that we can learn to coexist with. So let's take a deep breath. Actually, let's take one, and let's learn a little about anxiety and how we can learn to live with it. I think when you look at all of the things that are happening in the world, it would be impossible for us all not to feel anxious. And again, anxiety is a natural reaction. A little bit of anxiety is something that we actually all need. So when you are procrastinating and haven't started studying for that test you have coming up, a little bit of anxiety is what helps you to get up off the sofa and actually get into your work, but anxiety can become difficult when it becomes excessive and it starts to interrupt other places in your life. And so when we think about what anxiety is, it is an excessive worrying, excessive fears, related to specific things or maybe just excessive fear just in general. So one of the things that I have found most surprising in my practice is that because anxiety is something that we all have, people don't often recognize that the symptoms that they are having actually meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder because it feels like, "Oh, everybody must deal with this," right? And so I've had clients who have been having significant worries about maybe job performance, or what they're doing parenting, or their dating lives that had been impacting their ability to actually even go out and socialize. And it was not even until they came to therapy and started talking about their experiences that we realize like this is something that actually has a name and something that we actually can do something about. And so I think that that happens far more often than we know. Anxiety is the number one mental health disorder. It is diagnosed more often than anything else, especially again, as we are coming on the heels of the pandemic. It was one of the most searched for things in the beginning of the pandemic. So we definitely saw a spike in people searching for anxiety disorder information and getting more diagnoses of an anxiety disorder. So it's really funny because in conversations with other colleagues, mental health professionals, in the past, I would say four to five years, the treatment of anxiety has been more difficult because there is so much in the...