Living with Anxiety
Living with anxiety can feel like carrying an invisible, relentless weight. On the outside, you may be managing your daily life, pursuing your goals, and holding everything together, but internally, your mind and body are on high alert—constantly scanning for threat, predicting worst-case scenarios, or trying to think your way out of distressing feelings.
Anxiety is not a personal flaw, a lack of resilience, or a failure of willpower. From a neuroscience perspective, it is a protective nervous system response shaped by lived experiences, past stress, and the heavy cultural expectations placed on us to remain perpetually calm, productive, and in control.
How Anxiety Shows Up
While anxiety shows up uniquely for everyone, I commonly support clients navigating:
-
Generalized Anxiety (GAD): Persistent, non-stop "what-if" loops, chronic mental overthinking, difficulty turning off the mind, and an underlying sense of dread.
-
Panic & High Physical Arousal: Sudden, intense surges of panic, rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, chest tightness, dizziness, and the fear of losing control or having another panic episode.
-
Health Anxiety: Hyper-awareness of bodily sensations, constant scanning for symptoms, fear of serious illness, and repetitive researching or seeking reassurance.
-
Social & Performance Anxiety: Deep worry about judgment, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, and high self-scrutiny in social, relational, or professional settings.
Anxiety can feel like ...
-
Persistent Worry & Racing Thoughts: A mind that feels hyper-vigilant and unable to settle or rest.
-
Nervous System Overdrive: Physical tension, shallow breathing, digestive upset, restless energy, or ongoing exhaustion.
-
Avoidance & World-Shrinking: Feeling driven to avoid certain places, conversations, or situations to keep anxiety from spiking.
-
Self-Blame & Emotional Fatigue: Feeling frustrated by your internal alarm system and carrying self-criticism for feeling overwhelmed.
How Anxiety Therapy Can Help
My approach to therapy for anxiety is rooted in compassion, evidence-based practices, collaboration, and deep respect for your lived experience. Together, we work to help you stop fighting your internal world so you can build genuine trust in your body, respond to fear with clarity, and reconnect with what matters most.
In our sessions, we might:
-
Regulate Your Nervous System: Learn polyvagal-informed somatic practices to step out of fight-or-flight and cultivate a felt sense of physical and emotional safety in your body.
-
Unhook from Anxious Loops: Use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to shift your relationship with worrying thoughts so they lose their power and no longer dictate your daily choices.
-
Build Distress Tolerance: Develop practical tools to soothe acute panic, regulate intense emotional waves, and manage health-related worry during moments of high tension.
-
Gently Expand Your Life: Safely address avoidance through supportive, gradual exposure to help you reclaim activities, relationships, and spaces that anxiety has narrowed.
-
De-Pathologize Distress: Examine how societal expectations, gendered pressures, and systemic stressors contribute to self-doubt, helping you release shame and step back into your agency.
I often draw from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Polyvagal theory, and trauma-informed, feminist principles when working with anxiety and OCD.
