Anxiety & panic

Anxiety has a way of shrinking life. What begins as worry about specific things — work, health, what people think — gradually becomes a background hum that never quite switches off. Sleep suffers, the body stays braced, and avoiding things that spike the anxiety slowly narrows what feels possible. Panic adds its own cruelty: the fear of the next attack becomes a source of anxiety in itself.

How therapy helps

Anxiety is one of the best-understood difficulties in psychotherapy, and one of the most treatable. CBT works directly with the engine of anxiety — the catastrophic predictions, the safety behaviours, the avoidance that keeps fear alive — and has a strong evidence base for generalised worry, panic, social anxiety, health anxiety and phobias.

Sometimes, though, anxiety is the surface of something deeper: an early-learned vigilance, a fear of losing control, something unresolved that the mind keeps circling. Where that's the case, I bring in psychoanalytic understanding alongside the practical work, so we treat the root and not only the symptom.

What we'd work on

Understanding your particular pattern of anxiety; reducing the grip of physical symptoms; testing the predictions anxiety makes; gradually reclaiming what has been avoided; and building a different relationship with uncertainty itself.