How does anxiety work? Interview with Ruth Fernández Matía

Psychologist Ruth Fernández Matía gives several key ideas to understand how anxiety works.

Anxiety is one of the most frequent psychological disorders, and it can also be produced by a large number of different situations. That is why it is important to know how it works and what characterizes it.

For this reason, in this case we interviewed an expert psychologist in the resolution of anxiety problems: Ruth Fernández Matía..

The management of anxiety problems: interview with Ruth Fernández Matía, psychologist

Ruth Fernández Matía is a health psychologist with many years treating people with anxiety and mood problems. She currently resides in León, where she treats patients of all ages. Here he talks about the keys to understanding how anxiety works.

What are the risks of maintaining an anxiety problem for a long time? Can it lead to other disorders?

Anxiety maintained over time can lead to health problems, digestive problems, insomnia, headaches, dermatitis ... Influences social relationships, couple, in your academic performance, work ... can affect all quality of life.

The consequences of suffering from anxiety for a long time and without a solution, can lead to depression, abuse of certain substances or consumption of high-calorie foods that help in the short term to reduce these levels of nervous activation.

Do you think that for most people it is easy to detect when they have a problem with anxiety, beyond noticing a feeling of discomfort?

Many people are not aware of certain symptomatology that generates anxiety; they live like this for a long time and normalize it in their lives.

Anxiety can manifest itself in many ways; at a physiological level it produces an activation in our sympathetic nervous system that makes people feel physically bad, some manifest a feeling of suffocation and others are unable to swallow food. Sometimes they are not aware that it all stems from anxiety.

When patients affected by anxiety problems come to your office for the first time, what specifically do they complain about, in general?

Some report not sleeping, or having various dreams-nightmares, not having a restful sleep. Others come because they do not control their anger, others because they are in a low mood and apathetic, etc. There are also people who comment that they have started to think more negative things than usual, to have fears... although there is a similar symptomatology, each one channels anxiety in a different way.

Once you have detected that the underlying problem has to do with anxiety, what phases does the psychotherapy go through during the sessions?

I always like to evaluate the emotional maladjustment that they present in the now, and how their tendency is as a personality trait. In five sessions I do the evaluation again, and the patient himself will see how his emotional maladjustment has been reduced by more than 50%.

I perform a form of therapy with which the patient learns strategies and resources that will help him/her reduce anxiety. I work on the thoughts with very innovative techniques, and there is another behavioral part that is also very important.

Once several sessions have passed, what are the first signs that the therapy is having an effect?

Our most important and objective sign is the comparison of the evaluation after four sessions, there we objectively see the improvement. The patient himself begins to notice that he sleeps better, that he breathes more calmly and that all the symptoms of sympathetic nervous system activation are being deactivated.

What advice do you give to prevent the excessive accumulation of anxiety?

A basic and very preventive advice is to learn to breathe well, breathing is a natural anxiolytic. Our body is a natural pharmacy and we are not taking advantage of it.

Working on our thoughts is very important, because the quality and content of what you think modify our brain and the body ends up manifesting what our mind believes. We must also learn to distance ourselves from certain thoughts and beliefs, and generate new habits in the patient that lead to a better quality of life.