The problem of mismanaged anxiety: interview with Santiago Cid

The fact of mismanaging anxiety can generate problems that you have to know how to deal with.

Mismanaged anxiety is one of the most frequent psychological problems. It can manifest itself as a result of many different experiences and situations, and it also feeds back on itself: the discomfort produced by anxiety becomes anxiogenic.

Fortunately, more and more is known about how this psychological phenomenon affects us and how we can combat its effects and prevent it from damaging our quality of life. In this sense, the perspective that mental health professionals have on the subject is highly valued.

On this occasion, we interviewed Santiago Cid we interviewed Santiago Cida psychologist specialized in cognitive-behavioral therapy with extensive experience in the treatment of anxiety problems at his center in Madrid.

Putting solution to mismanaged anxiety: interview to Santiago Cid.

Santiago Cid, psychologist in charge of the Center of Psychology Santiago Cid (located in Santa Engracia Street, Madrid), is a professional of the cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy with more than 12 years of experience attending patients with anxiety problems.. In this case we asked him about the nature of the discomfort experienced by people with pathological anxiety, and about what can be done to avoid suffering from this kind of problems.

What led you to specialize in the treatment of anxiety?

Throughout my training it was one of the topics that I found most interesting, both because of the great results offered by cognitive-behavioral therapy in anxiety disorders and because of the growing need for treatment of these problems, which unfortunately affect more and more people.

In addition to formal training, it is clear that psychologists learn from their professional experience. Over the years, is there anything about anxiety problems that you have been surprised to discover from your therapy sessions?

Many; in fact, almost every day you find new things, both in terms of training, as there are continuous advances in treatment and daily clinical practice.

Of course, in these 12 years I have been surprised by many things, and more in a problem like this, in which one of its main characteristics is that loops are formed that without the help of a specialist are very very complicated to understand and of course to solve.

In what way can excessive anxiety wear down our health if we do not put a stop to it?

Actually, more than the pathological anxiety itself, what usually harms our health are the wrong strategies we use to try to eliminate it.

Many times we avoid doing sports or we stop having a social life, for example, and this is dangerous for our health; or we also fall into an unhealthy diet, since with pathological anxiety what the body seems to ask for are fatty foods, and these in turn put our well-being at risk.

At what point can we detect that anxiety is a serious enough problem to go to therapy?

Well, at the very moment it begins to interfere in our daily lives and generate discomfort. It is especially important to go to a specialist at the first signs of alarm, to prevent this problem from becoming established, because later it will be much more difficult to treat.

By way of summary... What are the most common strategies used in psychotherapy to help patients with this kind of problem?

The first step is always to carry out a rigorous evaluation, since each case is different and we should not generalize.

The techniques that have proven to be most effective, generally speaking, are psychoeducation, which helps to understand the problem, cognitive restructuring, which helps to work on unreasonable ideas and above all helps to approach the feared stimuli, and adequate exposure to the feared external or internal stimuli with the tools worked on in therapy.

What kind of instructions do you give your patients to practice at home or in their daily life in general between sessions?

We always send homework to work on at home, since therapy consists of 55 minutes a week, the week itself has 178 hours, and if we add this to the years or months in which the problem has been taking root, it is essential to do the homework between sessions.

Usually these exercises and routines are personalized, and some of the representative ones are: records to see how the situations brought to therapy are approached, psychoeducation material and tasks to generalize what has been learned.

Do you remember any case of a patient afflicted by anxiety whose improvement process makes you feel particularly satisfied?

Each and every case that has been discharged is a satisfaction for both me and the patient, because in the end this is a team effort. Throughout these 12 years there have been many, and all of them have given me the same satisfaction.