ANXIETY

A brief look at anxiety

Anxiety is the body and mind’s way of signalling that something feels unsafe or unresolved. From a polyvagal perspective, it’s the nervous system shifting into fight-or-flight. A physiological attempt to protect you when it senses threat, even if that threat is emotional or internal. From a schema lens, anxiety often arises when early patterns of fear, control, or abandonment are triggered, and old coping modes try to keep you safe. Psychodynamically, it can be seen as the mind’s alarm, like a warning that painful feelings or unmet needs are surfacing.

In therapy, we work to understand what your anxiety is trying to protect you from, to calm the body’s alarm system, and to build new ways of responding that bring both safety and freedom.

Common signs and symptoms of anxiety can include:

  • Persistent worry, fear, or dread that feels hard to control
  • Racing thoughts or difficulty switching off
  • Physical sensations such as a fast heartbeat, tight chest, shallow breathing, or nausea
  • Restlessness, fidgeting, or feeling “on edge”
  • Trouble concentrating or remembering things
  • Sleep problems – difficulty falling or staying asleep, night terrors, nightmares
  • Muscle tension, headaches, or digestive issues
  • Feeling detached, dizzy, or “out of body” when overwhelmed
  • Avoiding situations or people that trigger fear or discomfort
  • A constant sense that something bad might happen, even without clear cause

These symptoms reflect the nervous system in a state of high alert, trying to protect you, often long after the original source of threat has passed.

How I might work with anxiety:
I see anxiety as the body’s way of signalling a need for safety, not a sign of weakness or failure. In therapy, we work together to understand what your anxiety is protecting you from and to gently calm the body’s alarm system. We integrate the anxiety, rather than avoid it.

Using a blend of schema therapy, we uncover the early experiences and beliefs that shaped your fears; somatic and polyvagal approaches help regulate the nervous system so the body feels safe again; Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) supports you to process underlying emotions; and practical techniques offer practical tools for managing worry and overthinking.

Over time, therapy helps you build a sense of steadiness, self-trust, and the ability to meet life’s challenges with more calm and clarity.

Anxiety is physical so it can help to see breath as a modulatory for your nervous system.

  • Physiological breath – breath in, hold, breathe in again, hold, breathe out. No specified duration, just breathe, hold, breathe in, hold, then, breath out slowly through your nose. It ‘trips’ your nervous system back in ventral vagal (safe and connected) so that your mind stops being hijacked by threat.
  • Sing out loud what’s happening, for example, to the tune of whatever you choose; “I am anxious, I feel scared, this is horrible, anxiety sucks, is my brain going to explode”. It is hard to stay panicking when your trying to do something a bit silly.
  • Plunge your hands into cold or icy water – give your body something to appropriately worry about.
  • Plan to executively worry – rather than trying ‘not’ worry around the clock, plan an hour where you worry professionally. Go to town on catastrophic thinking in a time bound manner, and write it down. You’ll find that you worry about the same things in a circular way and noticing this can help you get some healthy distance.

General anxiety is a normal part of being human. We live in an age of anxiety and so it’s hard to imagine not feeling some level of activation in the context of a chaotic and increasingly complex world. Anxiety becomes a problem though, when it’s hypersensitive and reactive to things that in reality, aren’t actually a threat. Anxiety affects all types of people, from corporate achievers, to tradespeople. It is often misunderstood or under-diagnosed as it can masquerade as being highly driven, busy, controlling, irritable, introverted or approval seeking.

ANXIETY ISN’T JUST A CONSTELLATION OF WORRYING THOUGHTS. IT’S A BODILY EXPERIENCE AT SENSATE LEVEL. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF ANXIETY KEEPS US ON THE GO, ACTIVATED, MOBILISED AND HEADED FOR BURN OUT.

Anxiety has many drivers, and addressing each here is impossible as each of us has a unique story. What we can do fairly reliably though, is understand the experience of anxiety across multiple domains: thoughts, emotions, behaviours and physiology. The experience of anxiety can be debilitating, or mildly irksome but understanding how it shows up is a good way to check in with whether or not you might be struggling with it.

Schema Therapy and ‘bottom up’ or somatic therapies are an excellent route to coping better with anxiety by understanding it and meeting it with strategies that really help. If you are already taking medication for anxiety, this sometimes aids how effective therapy can be and is by no means a reason to avoid seeking support. Anxiety can present in numerous ways:

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THERAPY IF YOU HAVE ANXIETY

All therapy begins with what’s call a ‘complex assessment’. A complex assessment is like a diagnostic scan: we take time to look under the hood of what’s happening with your mind, emotions, relationships, and life context. It means I ask more questions, look for patterns, gather different data, and aim to create a map (a formulation) of how all the parts of your experience fit together. The goal is not just to label, but to understand, so that whatever therapy we do, it’s better-tailored and more likely to help.

A complex assessment might have this kind of format:

  • Extended interview & history
    I’ll spend more time asking about your life history, early experiences, relationships, significant events, medical history, and patterns over time (not just what brought you in now).

  • Multiple sources
    I might ask for permission to speak with (or review reports from) others who know you (e.g. GPs, previous therapists), or look at past medical or psychological records (with your consent).

  • Use of tools / measures
    Schema questionnaires, symptom inventories, risk screening (e.g., self-harm or safety) may be used to give us structured data.

  • Contextual exploration
    I’ll look at your environment, cultural background, current stresses (work, family), social supports, and systemic factors (financial, social, health) that influence your struggles.

  • Hypothesis / formulation building
    Rather than just saying “you have anxiety or depression,” I build a “story” or “map” of how these themes developed, what’s maintaining them, and where change might happen.

  • Planning & recommendation
    The output is not just “you’re this diagnosis,” but a plan: what kinds of therapy may help, in what order or priority, what risks to watch, and what supports you’ll need. It means we agree on a shared understanding of what the ‘problem’ is, and we might not be able to address everything, but that’s not what therapy is for. What we can do is see where there’s scope to grow, evolve, unstick the stuck and transform, something.

To this end, each therapeutic plan is different and tailored to your needs, and we tweak as we go depending on your changing needs.

Get in touch to start the ball rolling

In a sea of different therapists it can be overwhelming to know who to trust. That’s why you can call me for free and chat for 15 minutes. Tell me more about what’s ailing you and ask me how I might work with you.