avoidance

Health Anxiety: Unique Challenges and Therapeutic Adaptations

by John Nolan
25th February 202530th March 2025

Health anxiety presents unique challenges related to compulsive behaviours, reassurance seeking, and misinterpretation of bodily sensations. Therapeutic adaptations involve process-focused approaches such as ACT, emphasizing acceptance, values-based action, mindfulness, and experiential exposure. The therapist helps clients address avoidance and control efforts, fostering a collaborative relationship to navigate anxiety and live a more meaningful life.

Strategies for Managing Workplace Anxiety2nd April 2025
Coping with anxiety at work involves a multifaceted approach that includes setting healthy boundaries, making adjustments to the work environment, practising mindfulness and cognitive techniques, building assertiveness, and utilising available support. Gradual exposure to anxiety-provoking situations and a focus on problem-solving can also be effective strategies. Ultimately, learning to accept anxious feelings while staying engaged with work tasks and values is crucial for long-term well-being and effective coping with anxiety at work.
Supporting Wellbeing: Coaching for Stress Management at Work1st April 2025
Coaching for stress management at work is a collaborative process focused on helping individuals within a professional context to better understand and handle workplace pressures. It involves techniques like solution-focused questioning, exploring past successes, developing coping skills, and setting boundaries to enhance wellbeing and performance.
Coaching Beyond the Shadows: Embracing a Future-Oriented Path from Depression1st April 2025
Depression coaching centres on empowering individuals to move beyond current difficulties by focusing on their strengths and future aspirations. Key principles include fostering hope, leveraging strengths, setting achievable goals aligned with values, and cultivating acceptance. A future-oriented approach proves particularly effective by shifting focus from problems to possibilities, generating hope and motivation, creating clear goals, breaking rumination cycles, empowering agency, and building resilience. By illuminating a path forward, depression coaching supports individuals in actively creating the fulfilling lives they desire.
Sensory Pathways to Healing: The Rise and Integration of Psychosensory Therapy31st March 2025
Psychosensory therapy, with origins in traditional practices and modern neuroscience, is increasingly effective in mental health by directly influencing neurobiological states through sensory input. Techniques like Havening, EFT, and EMDR target the amygdala and can facilitate the processing of trauma and reduce anxiety. These therapies offer rapid, gentle, and empowering approaches for issues such as panic attacks, phobias, PTSD, chronic pain, and addictions. Psychosensory therapy integrates well with future-oriented modalities like SFBT, coaching, and NLP by quickly reducing distress, fostering self-empowerment, and creating a more receptive state for change and goal achievement.
Embracing Experience: Understanding and Moving Beyond Avoidance30th March 2025
Experiential avoidance, the attempt to evade unwanted inner experiences, plays a significant role in various mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma, leading to restricted lives and intensified distress. Overcoming this pattern involves cultivating awareness, acceptance, willingness, cognitive defusion, present moment contact, value clarification, gradual exposure, and self-compassion, enabling individuals to engage with a full range of experiences and move towards a more fulfilling life.