From psychotherapy to medications, from alternative medicine to lifestyle modifications and self-help strategies, there is a wide range of options when it comes to treating anxiety disorder. These so-called anxiety cures options all do one thing – reduce the symptoms of anxiety and prevent it from causing negative behaviors.

{Therapies}

Psychotherapeutic techniques compose the first line of treatment for any form of anxiety disorder.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT, a psychotherapeutic tool, is a key component of most anxiety treatment. CBT tries to identify the cause of panic attack by evaluating the individual’s thinking pattern. Once the negative thinking pattern has been determined, it is corrected and the patient is taught how to replace it with more appropriate thinking pattern. This is based on the basic premise that thoughts – and not actual events – are what create the behavior of a person. If perceptions or thoughts are correct and appropriate, it follows that the behavior is appropriate.

Five key components are present in this type of therapy – monitoring, education, physical control strategies, cognitive control strategies and behavioral strategies. All these components try to help an individual acquire a much healthier understanding of the condition while allowing him to form coping strategies that work to eliminate the symptoms of anxiety.

{Exposure Therapy}

For most people, it is a natural response to keep a distance from their object of fear. Exposure therapy tries to alter that.

As its name suggests, this therapy ‘exposes’ a person to his object of fear. The idea is that with repeated exposures, fear diminishes and eventually dies. The patient then gets cured with his anxiety disorder as he regains control over his object of fear.

There are 2 approaches to this therapy, both aim to simulate the actual conditions that cause the fear. The first approach happens mostly in the head of the patient. In the first approach, the patient imagines his object of fear and respond to it as he would in real life. The second is a more direct approach that forces the patient to actually confront his object of fear…in real life.

Although, by themselves, both cognitive and behavioral therapy and exposure therapy work very well, most psychotherapists opt to combine them to deliver faster treatment.

{Medications}

Medications are generally used as temporary measures. Because of their side effects, physicians generally try to limit the use of medications for treatment of anxiety. This is not to say that medications for anxiety are not effective though, they are.

Although there are numerous drugs used in treatment of anxiety disorders, only 3 classes of drugs are known to bring about the best results, these are:

{Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs}
{Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs)}
{Benzodiazpines}

For maximized effects, doctors typically combine medications and psychotherapy to as anxiety cures. To find out more about your options of treatment, seek your doctor’s recommendations.