Whatever shape your anxiety takes, you don't have to live with it as a given. I work with adults experiencing generalised anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety, performance anxiety, and the kind of free-floating dread that doesn't have an obvious name.
What anxiety actually is
Anxiety is your nervous system doing what it was designed to do, preparing you to respond to threat. The problem is that for many people, that system has become miscalibrated. It fires in situations that aren't dangerous. It stays on long after the actual stressor has passed. It interprets ordinary uncertainty as evidence that something is wrong.
The body and the mind feed each other in anxiety. A racing heart triggers anxious thoughts, which release more stress hormones, which speed up the heart further. Breaking that cycle requires working with both the physical sensations and the cognitive patterns that sustain them.
It's also worth saying: anxiety often makes sense in context. If you've experienced trauma, loss, illness, or chronic stress, an over-active threat system is not a malfunction. It's an adaptation. Therapy isn't about labelling that adaptation as wrong, it's about understanding it and helping it settle.
How I work with anxiety
My approach is integrative, drawing on several evidence-based modalities.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) helps you identify the thought patterns that fuel anxiety and develop new ways of relating to them. CBT is well-established and has strong empirical support for anxiety presentations.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses less on whether your anxious thoughts are true and more on whether they're helpful. It helps you move toward what matters to you, even when anxiety shows up.
Psychodynamic exploration can help when anxiety has deeper roots, when your nervous system has learned, often early in life, that uncertainty isn't safe. Understanding why your threat system is so primed adds depth that purely technique-driven work sometimes misses.
For physical anxiety, we may also work with practical regulation strategies, breathwork, grounding, and approaches that help the body itself settle.
What therapy with me looks like
We start by understanding your specific experience of anxiety, what it looks like, when it appeared, what it costs you, and what you've already tried. From there, we develop an approach tailored to you. There's no one-size-fits-all programme.
You won't be asked to “just relax” or to do things that feel overwhelming. Therapy for anxiety works best when it moves at a pace your nervous system can actually metabolise. Sometimes the work is calm and gradual. Sometimes it's more active. We figure that out together.