Treating pathological anxiety often requires allowing ourselves to feel anxious. That doesn't mean "white-knuckling" it or subjecting ourselves to terror; it's more about engaging with and confronting our fears "one step at a time" in a safe and therapeutic setting with someone at your side. Thro...

The paradox of anxiety is that what feels most instinctual and self-protective—escaping from the source of our fears or trying to ablate intolerable anxiety with a drink or a pill—often just reinforces it by teaching us that our fears are too powerful to face. It also primes us to monitor for its...

Like many psychiatric symptoms, anxiety can be conceptualized along a spectrum that ranges from the normal to the pathological. At the normal end, anxiety represents ...

When anxiety becomes pathological, it's often because of its intensity, disproportionality, and functional impact. When anxiety and fear intensify to panic and when worries blossom into disproportional mental ruminations about imagined rather than actual threats, the result is that we often freez...