The Role Of Physiotherapy In The Treatment Of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety is not a disease, but rather a natural response crucial for survival when we find ourselves facing a danger. An anxiety disorder is an exaggerated reaction to a trigger, and there are several types, including:

• Generalized anxiety disorder
• Social anxiety
• Social phobia
• Specific phobias
• Panic disorder
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Acute stress disorder

For most of us, relaxation means finishing a stressful day in front of a TV, but this form of "relaxation" is wrong because it can’t get to the root of the problem. To effectively combat anxiety and stress, a person should activate the body’s inborn stress responses.

Regular anxiety or anxiety disorder?

Working long hours, having financial problems, and emotional disturbances can all cause common day-to-day stress and anxiety. It’s completely normal, and we all stress out from time to time, but if you experience disproportionate levels of anxiety on most days it can cause significant damage to your health and the quality of your life.

Experts have agreed that anxieties that stop a person from participating in important experiences such as getting a new job, pursuing higher education, having friends and other meaningful relationships out of fear all increase the odds of being diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, many mental diseases appear in childhood and only get worse if left untreated. Females are as twice as likely to develop anxiety disorders compared to males.

Physical activity and anxiety disorders

Nowadays, the treatment of anxiety and most other mental disorders is based on psychotherapy, taking psychoactive drugs, and physiotherapy. Having in mind that anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorder in the United States, it’s important to educate people about the possible solutions to their anxiety problems and thus make their lives a little bit easier.

Physiotherapists are considered experts in the area of physical health, and some of them don’t realize the connection between physical and mental health. Research has shown that physiotherapy can help patients with mental issues in more than one way:

• Pain management without medications
• Improvement of cardiovascular health
• Improvement of strength and flexibility
• Personalized workouts that can improve a person’s overall wellbeing
• Motivating patients and promoting self-management of mental problems
• Raising self-esteem
• Keeping weight issues away by promoting healthy body image

Numerous studies have proven the effectiveness of physical activity as a preventative method for mental illness. Several physiotherapy strategies, such as aerobic and strength exercises, are potentially effective in improving the quality of both mental and physical health. The aerobic exercises that showed most effective against anxiety and depression include walking, jogging, swimming, and cycling.

Physiotherapy and the treatment of anxiety disorder

Exercise is often disregarded as an effective treatment for mental health issues, but studies have shown it helps with anxiety, depression, improves mood and cognitive functions, and even decreases the symptoms of schizophrenia. Exercises most commonly recommended for patients with anxiety include:

• Relaxation techniques
• Deep breathing
• Exercises to improve muscle flexibility and endurance
• Hydrotherapy
• General mobility exercises
• Improvement of posture
• Balance and equilibrium training
• Multi sensorial stimulation

It makes sense as relaxation is the term opposite of stress or anxiety. Relaxation training includes techniques such as meditation, applied relaxation, progressive muscular relaxation, autogenic training, and mindfulness. Besides relaxation techniques, physiotherapists help restore function and movement through exercise, manual therapy, as well as education and advice when a person is affected by either physical or mental illness, injury, or disability.

Research has shown that exercise and Laura Mitchell physiological relaxation techniques are most commonly used treatment approaches by physiotherapists working with mental health patients in the UK.

The bottom line

Hardly anything can help on its own, but if you combine several useful techniques that are proven to work against anxiety such as physiotherapy with – let’s say – cognitive behavioral therapy, you’ll probably see benefits a lot sooner than with physiotherapy or CBT alone.

We who struggle with anxieties can’t search for solutions on our own; different medical workers including general health practitioners, psychotherapists, as well as physiotherapists should work together and show patients that there are various options and how it’s important to find what fits them best.