Anxiety
Understanding anxiety and finding ways to respond differently.
Anxiety can affect how you think, feel and behave, sometimes becoming a persistent presence in everyday life. You might find yourself worrying about the future, overthinking situations, avoiding things that feel difficult or struggling to switch off from thoughts that keep returning.
I work with a range of anxiety difficulties, helping you understand the patterns behind them while developing more flexible ways of responding to anxious thoughts, feelings and situations.
When anxiety starts to take over
Anxiety can show up in different ways. You might find yourself constantly anticipating what could go wrong, replaying conversations, seeking reassurance, avoiding situations that make you uncomfortable or becoming increasingly focused on physical sensations and signs of danger.
Sometimes anxiety also turns thinking into a loop. You may spend a lot of time analysing possibilities, trying to work out what might happen or searching for an answer that feels certain enough. Thinking can be useful when it helps you understand a problem or decide what to do, but anxiety can make it difficult to know when thinking has stopped being helpful.
Sometimes anxiety is connected to a particular situation or period in your life. At other times, these patterns can become established over time and begin to affect areas of life that matter to you.
Therapy can help you understand what keeps these patterns going and explore different ways of responding, so that anxiety has less influence over what you do.
Anxiety can take different forms
Anxiety isn't always experienced as obvious fear or panic. It can involve persistent worry, overthinking, perfectionism, difficulty making decisions, fear of uncertainty, health anxiety or a strong need to feel in control.
You might also notice anxiety through physical symptoms such as tension, restlessness, a racing heart or difficulty sleeping. Sometimes these sensations can become a source of further worry, creating a cycle in which you become increasingly alert to how you feel.
Understanding the particular way anxiety operates for you can be an important part of therapy. We can explore both what may be contributing to your anxiety and what keeps the pattern going in the present.
Understanding where anxiety comes from
Anxiety can develop for many different reasons. Past experiences, relationships, learned patterns and periods of stress can all influence how we respond to situations that feel uncertain, threatening or overwhelming.
Exploring these experiences can help you develop a clearer understanding of why certain situations affect you in particular ways. It can also create space to consider whether patterns that once helped you cope are still serving you now.
At the same time, therapy isn't about finding a single explanation for everything you experience. Understanding the past can be useful, but so can paying attention to what is happening in the present and finding ways to respond differently.
Changing your relationship with anxiety
It can be tempting to make feeling less anxious the main goal — waiting until you feel calm, confident or certain before doing the things that matter to you. But anxiety does not always need to disappear before you can move forward.
Therapy can involve learning to respond differently to anxiety rather than organising your life around avoiding it. This might mean gradually approaching situations you have been avoiding, learning to tolerate uncertainty, stepping out of repetitive patterns of worry or making room for uncomfortable thoughts and feelings without allowing them to dictate what you do.
This is partly about developing greater flexibility: being able to notice anxiety without automatically responding to it, while keeping sight of what you want your life to be about.
Where appropriate, I incorporate approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and other evidence-informed strategies into my broader relational and integrative approach.