Anxiety
Anxiety is your body's alarm system doing its job: just too well, and too often. A certain amount of it is useful: it gets you to the airport on time and stops you stepping into traffic. The problem starts when the alarm won't switch off. The danger has passed, or was never really there, but your system hasn't noticed, so you're left with the racing thoughts, the tight chest, the 3am wide-awakeness, and the sense that something is wrong even when, on paper, nothing is.
If that sounds familiar, the important thing to know is that anxiety isn't a character flaw or a weakness. It's a system that learned to protect you, often for very good reasons, and hasn't yet learned that it can stand down. Check out my resource for anxiety below.
Common Signs & Symptoms
Anxiety shows up in the mind and the body, often at the same time: feeling constantly on edge, difficulty concentrating, muscle tension you only notice when it briefly lets go, irritability, a racing heart, disturbed sleep, and worry that jumps from one thing to the next without ever resolving. Many people also start avoiding situations, conversations and opportunities because avoiding feels easier than the dread.
If you've lived with anxiety for a long time, it can be hard to see it at all. It just feels like you. Recognising it as anxiety, rather than your personality, is often the first step in overcoming it.
Fight, flight, fawn or freeze
When your brain senses threat, it reaches for one of four old survival strategies: confront it (fight), get away from it (flight), appease it (fawn), or shut down entirely (freeze).
None of these is wrong, they all kept our ancestors alive, but each of us tends to have a default, and knowing yours tells you a lot about how your anxiety operates day to day. Someone whose default is fawn, for instance, may look endlessly agreeable on the outside while their nervous system is working overtime underneath.
What causes anxiety?
There's rarely a single cause. Temperament plays a part, and so does what you lived through: family patterns you experienced, periods of prolonged stress, big life changes, and painful or frightening experiences that left a mark. Working out what sits underneath your anxiety is important, because it's the difference between managing symptoms and actually resolving something.
If you're neurodivergent
If you're autistic, have ADHD, or are otherwise neurodivergent (diagnosed or suspected), your anxiety may appear differently. It can be triggered by sensory overload, the sheer effort of decoding social situations, years of masking, performing a version of yourself that takes so much energy, or a lifetime of ADHD-related consequences that taught you to brace for the next dropped ball.
That anxiety is real and treatable, but "your alarm learned something it can unlearn" is only part of the story: some of what's setting the alarm off is genuine daily load, and the work includes reducing the load and accommodating how you're wired, not just settling the alarm. If this is you, therapy with me adapts accordingly.
Common types of anxiety
Anxiety takes different shapes: generalised anxiety (worry that attaches itself to everything), social anxiety (where being seen and judged feels intolerable), panic attacks, health anxiety, and specific phobias. Many people experience more than one, and the combinations can change over time.
Trauma and PTSD
Sometimes anxiety isn't about everyday stress at all; it's rooted in things that happened to you. Trauma, whether a single frightening event or something sustained like abuse, can stay with the body long after the mind has filed it away. The diagnostic manual (DSM-5) calls the result PTSD; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I prefer to call it post-traumatic adaptation, because I don't believe it's a disorder at all: it's a nervous system that adapted to survive something, and is still running that adaptation. Flashbacks, nightmares and hypervigilance are the system doing what it learned to do. Understanding this connection helps you join the dots between what you went through and what you feel now.
How therapy can help
I'm what's called an integrative therapist, which means I don't apply one method to everyone's anxiety, because everyone's anxiety is different. Depending on what you need, we might work with the thoughts and behaviour patterns that keep anxiety running (a cognitive behavioural approach), explore where the alarm was first set, often in early relationships (psychodynamic work), build mindfulness and nervous-system settling skills, and address the practical foundations: sleep, movement, and how you actually spend your days.
I won't promise to make you never anxious again, nobody honestly can. What therapy can do is turn anxiety from something that runs your life into something you understand, can settle, and can live well alongside.
Anxiety therapy in Clapham, Tonbridge and online
I see clients for anxiety in person in Clapham (South London) and Tonbridge (Kent), and online via Zoom right across the UK.
