When Anxiety Is Running Your Day

Anxiety can feel like a background hum you never quite switch off. You might wake up already braced, run through lists of things that could go wrong, rehearse conversations that have not happened, and find yourself exhausted by mid-afternoon without really being able to say why. Some people experience it as a racing chest, shallow breathing, or a stomach that refuses to settle. Others describe it as a constant low-level unease, a sense of waiting for something bad to happen even when nothing in their life suggests it will.

The difficult part is that anxiety is often trying to help. It is the nervous system doing what it learned to do: scan, anticipate, prepare. The problem is not that it is switched on. The problem is that it has forgotten how to switch off.

Stress works in a similar way. Short bursts of stress are manageable and sometimes useful. Chronic stress, sustained over weeks, months or years, is a different thing entirely, and it gradually reshapes how your body and mind respond to almost everything.

How Therapy Can Help

I work with anxiety on two levels. The first is practical. Using elements of CBT, we look at the thought patterns that keep anxiety spinning, the avoidance that shrinks your world a little more each week, and the small behavioural shifts that can interrupt the cycle. These are concrete tools you can start using between sessions.

The second level is deeper. Anxiety is rarely only about the things it seems to be about. For many people there is something underneath it, an older fear, an unprocessed experience, a pattern set up in childhood when the world felt less safe than it needed to be. Where that is the case, we can work more slowly, using person-centred exploration and where appropriate nervous system-informed approaches, to understand what your anxiety is really protecting you from.

Who This Work Is For

  • Generalised anxiety that has become the default background of your day
  • Panic attacks that arrive without warning and leave you afraid of the next one
  • Health anxiety that has taken over how you interpret sensations in your body
  • Social anxiety that makes ordinary interactions feel like something to prepare for
  • Work-related anxiety, performance pressure, and the perfectionism that often sits alongside it
  • Anxiety that has followed a specific life event and will not settle, even though the event is over

What to Expect from Sessions

We begin with the present. What does your anxiety look like day to day, what triggers it, what has helped so far and what has not. From there, we work out together which approaches are likely to be most useful: practical tools to reduce the immediate intensity, and deeper exploration of the patterns underneath. There is no fixed programme. The work responds to what you bring each week.

Individual counselling sessions are 50 minutes and cost £70. Sessions take place online across the UK via a secure video platform.

Further Reading

Ready to Work with Your Anxiety Differently?

If anxiety is shrinking your world, therapy can help you understand what is driving it and build the capacity to respond differently.

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