A new approach to anxiety therapy

Male adult wearing a white tee and navy joggers. sitting crosslegged and meditating in a wild meadow

Many people who come to see me are experiencing anxiety in one form or another.

Sometimes it’s obvious: acute anxiety, stress, panic attacks. But anxiety can also show up in other, less visible ways, such as OCD, compulsive behaviours, intrusive thoughts or relentless overthinking.

With relationship OCD (ROCD), for example, anxiety can become intensely focused on your partner and your relationship: “Do I really love them? What if they leave me? Should I break up with them?"

Whatever form it takes, anxiety can feel incredibly convincing.

When your nervous system is overwhelmed, thoughts can feel urgent. Decisions can feel impossible. We can become caught in loops of analysing, checking and second-guessing ourselves, desperately trying to reach certainty before we make a decision or move forward.

This can affect so much more than how we feel. It can affect our relationships, our work, our confidence, the goals we set and the choices we make about our lives.

A different way of working

My approach offers something a little different from conventional talking therapy.

Talking absolutely has its place. Having space to explore what is going on, feel heard and begin making sense of your experiences can be incredibly valuable.

I don't need you to find the right words for what is happening in order to help you navigate and manage anxiety - nor do you need to recall or articulate painful memories.

I often use elements of neuroscience, psychological research and somatic work in therapy.

As well as listening to what you tell me, I pay attention to what may be happening in your body and nervous system in the present moment.

Have you ever felt intensely upset or angry or scared by the way someone speaks to you? Or perhaps they haven't even said anything, but the way they rolled their eyes triggered feelings of fury and distress, so you hated or feared them in that moment, but later felt embarassed by how you'd felt or reacted?

It could be helpful to think of your nervous system as a living archive that stores every experience you’ve ever had. When you're feeling an intense, often disproportionate reaction to something or someone, triggered by what they have said or done (or not said and not done) - our nervous system is triggered and takes you back, a bit like time travel, to the earliest time you experienced something like that.

In the present moment, all rational thought and reasoning seems to leave you. You can feel paralysed and unable to respond with any kind of articulacy. Often this is when, in a session, I might ask: "How old did you feel in that moment?", to help you to understand that a much younger part of you had taken over and could only react with the limited resources of a child or much younger person.

This is when inner child and reparenting work can be brought into the sessions to help connect with this wounded part of you that needs to feel compassion and understanding.

If you become anxious or emotionally flooded during a session, we can work with what is happening there and then. You don’t necessarily have to go back into a painful experience, remember every detail or explain exactly why you feel the way you do before we can begin helping that emotional intensity to settle.

A significant part of this to is to help you to create psychological distance.

When we’re highly anxious, we can become completely immersed in what we’re thinking and feeling. The thought and the reality can begin to feel like the same thing. Creating even a small amount of psychological distance can change that.

Research into emotion regulation and self-distancing suggests that changing our perspective on an emotional experience can reduce its intensity and help us respond to it differently. Sometimes this can be achieved through surprisingly small changes — even something as simple as changing the language we use when we talk to ourselves.

It’s not about disconnecting from your feelings, suppressing them or pretending they aren’t there.

It’s about moving from:

“This feeling is taking over”

to:

“I can notice this feeling and decide what I want to do next.”

That may sound like a very small psychological shift. But it can be a significant one.

When we’re less emotionally flooded, we can create more room for perspective. We may be better able to consider our options, make decisions, set goals and choose a way forward based on what actually matters to us — rather than simply responding to what anxiety is telling us to do in that moment.

Research also suggests that anxiety can interfere with aspects of cognitive functioning such as working memory and cognitive flexibility, which helps explain why thinking clearly and flexibly can sometimes feel so difficult when we’re highly anxious.

Learning to manage anxiety can therefore be about much more than simply feeling calmer. It can mean greater autonomy: being able to recognise what is happening internally without automatically allowing it to determine your next move.

It gives you more opportunity to ask: What do I actually want? What matters to me? What choice is most aligned with the life I want to build?

Practical tools, techniques and life hacks

This is an important part of how I work. As well as helping you gain insights into why you feel the way you do, I'll also support you with practical tools you can use in your own life.

The aim isn’t for you to feel that you can only manage anxiety when you’re sitting in the therapy room with me. It’s to help you develop your own understanding of your nervous system, your own toolkit and, over time, greater confidence in your ability to respond differently.

I’ve put together five research-informed psychological exercises that you can experiment with yourself. They draw on ideas including affect labelling, distanced self-talk and the Fresh Start Effect.

Each creates a slightly different psychological shift, but they share the same underlying principle:

Create a little distance. Create a little space. Then decide what you want to do next.

Because managing anxiety isn’t necessarily about getting rid of every anxious thought or feeling.

It’s about reaching a point where anxiety no longer has to make your choices for you.