Taming Anxiety

Embark on a transformative journey with Melanie Justice, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with over 20 years of experience specializing in anxiety. Drawing upon her extensive clinical work, advanced training from the UCLA anxiety and OCD clinics, experience supporting young adults, and personal understanding as a mother, Melanie offers a compassionate and insightful approach to understanding and managing your anxiety.

This course will guide you in demystifying your anxiety by exploring its foundational principles. You will learn to recognize the purpose behind your body's reactions to triggers and gain access to a powerful toolkit of practical strategies. Through consistent practice, you will develop the ability to readily access these tools when you need them most, empowering you to shift from feeling overwhelmed by anxiety to living a more thriving life.

Course Highlights:

• Understanding Your Body's Alarm System: Discover how anxiety functions as a natural, yet sometimes oversensitive, alarm system designed for survival. Learn to differentiate between helpful and unhelpful anxiety responses.
• Decoding Key Anxiety Terms: Gain clarity on essential concepts such as panic attacks, the fight-or-flight response (including its four potential expressions), the parasympathetic nervous system, and the nature of anxiety triggers.
• The Purpose Behind Physical Symptoms: Understand the physiological reasons behind common anxiety symptoms like increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and tingling sensations, reducing the fear associated with these experiences.
• Exploring Different Types of Anxiety: Gain an overview of various anxiety presentations, including social anxiety, specific phobias, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (with guidance on when specialized support is recommended).
• Breaking the Cycle of Panic: Learn to identify the cyclical nature of panic and pinpoint key intervention points to regain control, focusing on disrupting the link between physical sensations and escalating fear.
• The Power of Acceptance: Surfing the Waves of Anxiety: Discover the counterintuitive yet highly effective approach of accepting anxious feelings rather than fighting them, using the analogy of ocean waves and finger traps to illustrate this concept.
• Understanding the Roots of Anxiety: Explore the multifaceted origins of anxiety, including genetic predispositions, the impact of trauma, the influence of learned behaviors (modeling), and the role of cognitive distortions in fueling anxiety.
• Common Cognitive Distortions: Identify and understand common unhelpful thinking patterns such as generalization, catastrophizing, personalization, black or white thinking, and mental filtering.
• Two Paths to Reducing Anxiety: Learn about the crucial balance between utilizing immediate coping tools to manage in-the-moment anxiety and implementing long-term strategies to reduce your overall baseline anxiety level.
• Immediate Tools: Your Secret Weapon - Mindfulness: Be introduced to the power of mindfulness as a tool for staying present and interrupting anxious thought patterns rooted in the past or future.
• The Power of 5-Senses Grounding: Learn and practice a simple yet highly effective mindfulness technique to anchor yourself in the present moment by engaging your five senses.
• Diaphragmatic Breathing: Your Body's Natural Calming Tool: Master the technique of diaphragmatic breathing (belly breathing) to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and counteract the fight-or-flight response.

Join Melanie on this empowering course and begin your journey towards understanding, managing, and ultimately thriving beyond your anxiety.