Poorly managed 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 is anxiety-inducing.

Fortunately, more and more is known about how this psychological phenomenon affects us and how we can combat its effects and ensure that it does not harm 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 , a psychologist specializing in cognitive-behavioral therapy with extensive experience in the treatment of anxiety problems in his center in Madrid.

Solving mismanaged anxiety: an interview with Santiago Cid

Santiago Cid, psychologist in charge of the Centro de Psicología Santiago Cid (located in Calle Santa Engracia, Madrid), is a professional in 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 this kind of problem.

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 that cognitive-behavioral therapy offered 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 the problems of anxiety that you have been surprised to discover from your therapy sessions?

Many; in fact almost every day you find new things both on a training level, 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, where 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.

How can excessive anxiety wear down our health if we don’t curb it?

In reality, more than the pathological anxiety itself, it is the erroneous strategies we use to try to eliminate it that are often harmful to health.

Many times we avoid doing sports or stop socializing, 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 is fatty food, and this in turn puts our well-being at risk.

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

For at the very moment it begins to interfere with 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, as it will be much more difficult to treat afterwards.

To summarize… What are the most common strategies used in psychotherapy to help patients with these kinds of problems?

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

The techniques that have demonstrated the greatest effectiveness, generally speaking, are psychoeducation, which helps to understand the problem, cognitive restructuring, which helps to work on unreasonable ideas and, above all, favours approaching the feared stimuli, and adequate exposure with the tools worked on in therapy to the feared external or internal stimuli.

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

We always send homework to work 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 faced, psychoeducation material and tasks to generalize what has been learned.

Do you remember a case of an anxiety patient whose improvement process makes you feel especially satisfied?

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