When you struggle with anxiety, it often means worrying about the future. This can take away from your mindfulness in the present. It can take support from others around you to help pull you back toward the present moment, and with activities for anxiety group therapy, this is made much easier.
What are Activities for Anxiety Group Therapy?
Activities for anxiety group therapy are things grounded in self care, mindfulness, CBT and DBT. These activities are things that you can do for yourself and then share and reflect upon with the group or things that the entire group can contribute to at the same time.
How do Activities for Anxiety Group Therapy Help?
The activities you do in a group therapy session can provide tools and techniques that you can employ outside of therapy when your anxiety gets higher.
Shifting Your Focus
One of these includes mindfulness and meditation exercises that center on breathing and relaxation. These are active techniques that can be employed during group therapy sessions to help you:
- Focus your awareness on the present
- Be more mindful of where you carry physical tension in your body
- Learn to reduce muscle tension
- Focus on things other than unhelpful and worrying thoughts
Better Understanding
The exercises used with activities for anxiety group therapy provide you with a deeper understanding of how anxiety works, what it triggers in the body, and what things contribute to your personal symptoms.
You might, for example, be asked to keep a diary of how you feel at various points throughout the day so that you can understand when you are most anxious and what circumstances surround those feelings.
During group therapy sessions everyone can have an opportunity to share and come to an understanding of more common triggers that affect the whole group versus individual triggers that affect you one-on-one.
CBT Exercises
Other activities can include writing activities derived from cognitive behavioral therapy. These might include a Worry Tree.
What is a Worry Tree?
This is where you take a piece of paper and start with the top of the tree. The top of the tree is where you write down the worries you are having, the anxiety you feel.
From there, you branch out in one of two directions, one being whether it’s something within your control and the other being something that is not.
More branches come from each of those. If it is not something within your control then you have to utilize relaxation techniques or distraction techniques so that you aren’t focused on it because it’s not something you can deal with or change.
However if it is something within your control then you can set up a plan of action that includes what steps you will take, when you will take them, and what you require to do so.
Other techniques include Worry Time.
What is Worry Time?
Worry Time is another CBT activity for anxiety group therapy sessions where everyone learns to write down the things about which they are concerned.
Remember that anxiety stems from a real place of concern or fear, and sometimes the anxiety you have needs to be tackled, needs to be thought about and needs to be resolved, but it doesn’t need to do all of those things all day, everyday, occupying all of your thoughts.
This is where worry time comes into play. With this technique you set a specific time of day which could be during group therapy sessions where you sit down with the things that are of biggest concern to you and you work through them with things like the Worry Tree. When you have a designated time during the day then when those anxious thoughts come back you can remind yourself that you will deal with them during your designated time but not right now.
Starting Anxiety Group Therapy
With The Differents, you have an opportunity to participate in a flexible, luxury drug rehab program in the beautiful Tahoe region. With our programs you have access to holistic treatment as well as recreational therapy, outdoor therapy, meditation, yoga, and CBT.
A big part of our programs is the group therapy sessions where you can learn to cope with symptoms of an anxiety disorder in addition to substance abuse. These sessions incorporate different activities that help improve your understanding of substance abuse or dual diagnosis situations with techniques that you can employ long after you leave our treatment center.
We work hard to offer a 1:3 staff-to-client ratio with a focus on private, luxury experiences that are unlike other treatments.
Contact us today at (844) 407-0461 to see how our activities for anxiety group therapy programs can give you the tools you need to take charge of your life.
