If you are taking medications or are seeking therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, this video is for you. My name is Evan with Optimal TMS. And first, let’s take a minute to talk about what exactly is going on in the brain with anxiety.
First of all, it’s important to realize that anxiety isn’t always necessarily a bad thing. There’s a reason that your brain is programmed to feel fear, nervousness, tension, and uncertainty around certain situations. For example, feeling anxiety can help a lot with performance under certain situations if you’re trying to meet a deadline at work or have a lot of pressures in life at a given moment.
But it becomes a problem when that anxiety gets generalized, leading to the name generalized anxiety disorder. This is when your brain interprets everything that is going on in your life as a threat. When your brain constantly feels threatened, that can lead to things like increased cortisol, bad sleep, and other life-impacting symptoms.
Ultimately, all of this happens because the brain isn’t firing properly. It’s not reacting to the signals that tell you that everything is going to be okay. This is where TMS comes in.
Unlike medications that can calm and regulate activity throughout the brain or therapy that teaches you different thinking patterns of how to deal with stressful life situations, TMS works directly on the circuits causing anxiety. By sending powerful magnetic pulses targeted to specific regions of your brain, we are able to influence the areas that cognitively control these powerful emotions.
By regulating these circuits and changing the activity in your brain, we can retrain these pathways to appropriately respond to situations and not view everything that is going on in life as a constant threat. When somebody has undergone TMS for anxiety, this can lead to, in some instances, being able to come off of anti-anxiety medications.
This can also lead to breakthroughs in traditional talk therapy methods. As these new pathways in the brain are formed and we are able to make the brain fire in healthy ways again, therapies and other medications that haven’t worked for you before may start working better in the future.
Ultimately, we want you to feel the way that you want to feel. So if you are looking for alternative treatments for anxiety, please reach out to our team and we will get you scheduled for a consultation with one of our providers. Thank you so much.
