Online counselling for anxiety & overwhelm

Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people reach out, and one of the most treatable. Whether it shows up as constant worry, a racing mind at 3am, physical tension, or full-blown panic, it's your body's alarm system working overtime. Therapy helps you understand that alarm and gently turn down the volume.

How I help with anxiety

As an integrative therapist I'm trained in a broad range of modalities and choose what fits you. For this work I most often draw on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based techniques (MBCT). Together we'll look at the thoughts and patterns feeding your anxiety, and build practical tools you can actually use in the moment, not just talk about them.

What anxiety can look like

Some periods of life raise it sharply. Anxiety during pregnancy is more common than antenatal depression and gets a fraction of the attention, particularly for anyone carrying after a previous loss.

You might recognise some of these: persistent worry you can't switch off, trouble sleeping, irritability, avoiding certain situations, which exposure work addresses directly, a churning stomach, or panic attacks that seem to come from nowhere. If any of that sounds familiar, counselling can help, you don't need to be "in crisis" to deserve support.

You don't have to wait until it's unbearable. Reaching out early often means feeling better, faster.

Why anxiety keeps itself going

Anxiety is maintained by the things you do to cope with it. That sounds harsh and it is not meant as a criticism; it is the single most useful thing to understand about it.

When something feels dangerous, you avoid it. Avoiding brings immediate relief, which teaches the brain that the avoidance is what kept you safe. The threat never gets disproved, so next time the alarm is slightly louder and the avoidance slightly wider. Over months and years the world quietly shrinks, and it shrinks in a way that feels sensible at every individual step.

The same mechanism runs through the smaller behaviours: checking, googling symptoms, seeking reassurance, rehearsing a conversation forty times, arriving an hour early. Each one lowers anxiety in the moment and raises it over time. These are called safety behaviours, and identifying yours is usually one of the first things we do, because they are invisible from the inside.

What treatment actually involves

Not a series of conversations about how anxious you feel. The arc is fairly consistent.

We start with an assessment and then build a formulation, which is a shared map of what sets your anxiety off, what you do about it, and how those two things feed each other. People often say this stage alone changes something, because random and frightening becomes patterned and explicable.

Then come the skills: CBT work on the catastrophic predictions, and body-based tools for the physical side, which matter because you cannot think your way out of a nervous system that is already firing. After that, the part that does the heavy lifting: gradually and deliberately reversing the avoidance through graded exposure, or through systematic desensitisation where a specific fear is the problem.

The last phase is the one people are most tempted to skip, and it is relapse prevention. Finishing while residual symptoms are still present is the strongest predictor of anxiety returning, which is why I would rather we finish properly than stop the week you first feel better.

Anxiety, or something that looks like it

Several different things bring people to this page, and they respond to different work.

Generalised worry that moves from topic to topic. Panic attacks, where the fear is of the physical sensations themselves. Social anxiety, organised around being judged. Health anxiety, which runs on checking and reassurance. Specific phobias. And intrusive thoughts with compulsions, which is OCD territory and needs a particular approach rather than general anxiety work.

It is also worth separating anxiety from ordinary pressure, because the two are treated differently and are constantly confused. Stress is a response to something happening; anxiety persists in the absence of it. Where the picture is sustained pressure with no recovery rather than an overactive alarm, burnout is often the more accurate description. And where the anxiety has been there since childhood rather than arriving with a life event, something older may be setting the terms.

Sessions that fit your life

All sessions are online or by phone, across time zones, with a free 15-minute consultation to start. We go at your pace, in whichever way feels most comfortable for you.