7 Signs You Might Benefit from Anxiety Therapy (And What to Expect)

"Is my anxiety bad enough for therapy?"

I hear this question constantly. People apologise before telling me about panic attacks that leave them gasping on the bathroom floor, or describe years of avoiding social situations because the anticipation makes them physically sick, and then add: "But I know other people have it worse."

Here's what I wish everyone knew before walking into their first session: you don't need to wait until you're completely non-functional to deserve support. If anxiety is making your life smaller, harder, or less joyful than it could be, that's reason enough.

This article outlines seven clear signs that anxiety therapy could genuinely help you, what that therapy might involve, and how to take the first step.

What Counts as "Normal" Anxiety vs When It's a Problem

Let's start with the simple answer: anxiety itself isn't the enemy. It's an evolved response designed to keep you safe. Feeling anxious before a job interview or first date is normal—your brain recognises potential social risk and mobilises resources.

Anxiety becomes problematic when:

• It's disproportionate to actual danger
• It persists even after the threat has passed
• It stops you doing things that matter to you
• It significantly impacts your quality of life

Think of it like pain. A bit of muscle soreness after exercise is normal. Chronic pain that stops you sleeping and requires constant painkillers is a signal that something needs attention. Anxiety works similarly.

You don't need a formal diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, or Panic Disorder to benefit from therapy. If anxiety is making your world smaller or your days harder, that's enough.

Sign 1: Your Anxiety Feels Out of Proportion to the Situation

You know intellectually that sending a work email shouldn't make your heart race, or that meeting friends for coffee isn't dangerous, but your body responds as though you're facing a genuine threat.

What This Looks Like:

• Spending hours crafting a two-line message because you're terrified of how it might be received
• Feeling overwhelming dread about social events that you know, rationally, will probably be fine
• Catastrophising minor mistakes into career-ending disasters
• Needing constant reassurance about things that others handle easily

One client described anxiety as "having a faulty smoke alarm that screams whenever you make toast." Everything triggers the alarm, even when there's no actual fire.

Why This Happens:

Anxiety doesn't respond to logic because it's not a thinking problem—it's a nervous system response. Your amygdala (the brain's threat-detection centre) has become over-sensitised, interpreting ambiguity or uncertainty as danger.

Telling yourself "this is silly, calm down" rarely helps because you're trying to reason with a part of your brain that operates beneath conscious thought.

How Therapy Helps:

Anxiety therapy works on multiple levels:

• Understanding your triggers: What situations, thoughts, or memories activate your anxiety?
• Nervous system regulation: Techniques to soothe your activated threat response
• Cognitive restructuring: Examining the thoughts fuelling your anxiety
• Gradual exposure: Safely building tolerance to anxiety-provoking situations

Sign 2: You're Avoiding Things That Matter to You

Avoidance is anxiety's signature move. It feels like relief in the short term but makes the problem worse over time.

What This Looks Like:

• Turning down opportunities because anticipating them feels unbearable
• Cancelling plans at the last minute with vague excuses
• Never speaking up in meetings even when you have valuable input
• Avoiding dating, travel, or career progression because of anxiety
• Structuring your entire life around what you can manage without triggering panic

A particularly poignant example: a client who'd wanted to visit her grandmother in Ireland for three years but couldn't face the flight. When her grandmother died, the grief was compounded by regret over all those missed visits.

The Avoidance Trap:

Every time you avoid something anxiety-provoking, two things happen:

1. Short-term relief: Your anxiety drops immediately, which feels like proof that avoiding was the right choice
2. Long-term reinforcement: Your brain learns that the situation was indeed dangerous (otherwise why would you avoid it?), making the anxiety stronger next time

This creates a vicious cycle where the list of things you can't do grows longer, and your confidence shrinks.

How Therapy Helps:

Therapists use gradual exposure—not throwing you into the deep end, but building tolerance step by small step. You learn that you can tolerate discomfort, that anxiety peaks and then subsides, and that the catastrophic outcomes you fear rarely materialise.

Equally important is exploring what the avoidance is protecting you from. Sometimes anxiety isn't just about the situation itself—it's connected to deeper fears about rejection, failure, or loss of control.

Sign 3: Physical Symptoms Are Affecting Daily Life

Anxiety doesn't just live in your head. It manifests physically, sometimes in ways that feel alarming enough to send you to A&E convinced you're having a heart attack.

Common Physical Symptoms:

• Heart palpitations or chest tightness
• Shortness of breath or feeling like you can't get enough air
• Dizziness or lightheadedness
• Nausea or digestive problems
• Tension headaches or jaw clenching
• Trembling or shaking
• Sweating (even when not hot)
• Insomnia or disrupted sleep
• Fatigue (anxiety is exhausting)

Many people visit their GP multiple times before realising these symptoms are anxiety-related rather than indicators of serious physical illness.

The Mind-Body Connection:

When your brain perceives threat, it activates your sympathetic nervous system—the "fight or flight" response. This floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol, which create all those unpleasant physical sensations.

The cruel irony: these symptoms themselves can trigger more anxiety. You notice your heart racing, worry that something's wrong, which makes your heart race faster. This creates a feedback loop that can escalate into a full panic attack.

How Therapy Helps:

Anxiety therapy teaches you:

• Psychoeducation: Understanding what's happening in your body and why
• Somatic techniques: Breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, grounding practices
• Interoceptive exposure: Safely experiencing physical sensations to reduce fear of them
• Mindfulness: Observing sensations without judgment or panic

When you understand that a racing heart is uncomfortable but not dangerous, the fear response often lessens.

Sign 4: You Can't Switch Off the Worry

Your brain feels like a browser with 47 tabs open, all playing slightly different versions of disaster scenarios. The moment you resolve one worry, another pops up to take its place.

What This Looks Like:

• Waking at 3am with your mind immediately racing
• Struggling to concentrate on conversations or tasks because you're preoccupied with worries
• "What if" thinking spirals: "What if I fail? What if they don't like me? What if something terrible happens?"
• Seeking constant reassurance from others
• Difficulty making decisions because you catastrophise all possible outcomes
• Checking behaviours (repeatedly checking locks, emails, your appearance)

One client described it as "living in a mental courtroom where I'm simultaneously the prosecutor presenting worst-case scenarios and the defence attorney trying to prove they won't happen—but the prosecutor always wins."

The Function of Worry:

Counterintuitively, chronic worry often serves a purpose. It can feel like if you worry enough, you can prevent bad outcomes (magical thinking). Or it might feel like worrying is what responsible people do—if you stopped worrying, you'd be reckless or naive.

How Therapy Helps:

Rather than trying to eliminate worry entirely, therapy helps you change your relationship with it:

• Identify worry patterns: When, where, and what triggers excessive worry?
• Reality-testing: Examining the likelihood and consequences of feared outcomes
• Scheduled worry time: Containing worry to specific periods rather than letting it dominate your day
• Acceptance strategies: Learning to tolerate uncertainty without needing to resolve every "what if"
• Exploring underlying needs: What is the worry trying to protect you from?

Sign 5: It's Impacting Your Relationships

Anxiety doesn't exist in isolation. It affects how you connect with partners, friends, family, and colleagues.

What This Looks Like:

In romantic relationships:

• Constant need for reassurance ("Do you still love me?" "Are we OK?")
• Interpreting neutral behaviour as signs of rejection
• People-pleasing to avoid conflict or abandonment
• Struggling with intimacy because vulnerability feels too risky

In friendships:

• Declining invitations so often that eventually people stop asking
• Overthinking every interaction ("Did I say something wrong?")
• Feeling like a burden when you're struggling

At work:

• Never asking questions for fear of looking incompetent
• Difficulty accepting feedback without spiralling
• Avoiding networking or visibility opportunities

One particularly painful dynamic: anxiety can make you withdraw precisely when you most need connection, creating loneliness that feeds back into anxiety.

The Reassurance Trap:

Seeking reassurance feels like it should help, but it often backfires. The relief is temporary, and soon you need another fix. Over time, this can strain relationships and reinforce your belief that you can't trust your own judgment.

How Therapy Helps:

Relationship-focused anxiety work might explore:

• Attachment patterns: How early relationships shaped your expectations and fears
• Communication skills: Expressing needs directly rather than through anxiety
• Boundaries: Learning to self-soothe rather than outsourcing all comfort to others
• Self-compassion: Reducing the harsh self-criticism that fuels social anxiety

Sign 6: You're Using Unhelpful Coping Strategies

When anxiety feels unbearable, you find ways to make it stop—even if those ways create new problems.

Common Unhelpful Coping Strategies:

Substance use:

• Drinking to "take the edge off" social situations
• Cannabis to quiet anxious thoughts
• Prescription medication misuse

Disordered eating:

• Restriction as a way to feel control
• Binge eating for comfort
• Obsessive exercise to manage anxiety

Overwork:

• Staying frantically busy to avoid difficult feelings
• Perfectionism and burnout

Compulsive behaviours:

• Excessive checking (locks, emails, body symptoms)
• Reassurance-seeking
• Compulsive cleaning or organising

Self-harm:

• Cutting, burning, or other forms of self-injury as emotional release

None of these strategies are moral failings. They make perfect sense as attempts to manage overwhelming distress. The problem is they work just well enough in the short term to keep you trapped in patterns that ultimately make anxiety worse.

How Therapy Helps:

Rather than just stopping unhelpful behaviours, therapy helps you:

• Understand the function: What need is this behaviour meeting?
• Develop alternatives: Healthier ways to meet the same need
• Address the root: Working with the underlying anxiety rather than just managing symptoms
• Build tolerance: Sitting with difficult feelings without needing to escape them immediately

Crucially, a good therapist won't shame you for these coping mechanisms. They'll help you develop something better whilst acknowledging that you were doing your best with the resources you had.

Sign 7: Nothing You Try Yourself Is Working

You've read the articles, tried the meditation apps, bought the self-help books, implemented breathing exercises—and whilst some things help a bit temporarily, the underlying anxiety remains stubbornly present.

What This Looks Like:

• Feeling frustrated that you "should" be able to fix this yourself
• Accumulating self-help strategies that work for others but not for you
• Feeling like you're doing everything "right" but still struggling
• Wondering if you're somehow uniquely broken

Let me be clear: there's absolutely nothing wrong with self-help resources. Many people find genuine benefit in books, apps, and online resources.

But if you've been trying for months (or years) without meaningful improvement, that's not a failure on your part. It likely means:

• The anxiety is too complex for generic solutions
• You need personalised support tailored to your specific situation
• Underlying issues need exploring that self-help can't reach
• You'd benefit from the accountability and relationship of therapy

How Therapy Is Different:

Personalisation: Rather than one-size-fits-all techniques, therapy adapts to your specific patterns, history, and needs.

The relationship: The therapeutic relationship itself is healing. Being fully heard and understood without judgment creates safety that's hard to replicate through self-help.

Depth: Therapy can explore root causes—early experiences, attachment patterns, traumatic events—that shaped your anxiety.

Accountability: Having someone expecting to see you weekly keeps you engaged with the work even when it's difficult.

Professional expertise: A trained therapist can spot patterns you can't see from inside your own experience.

What Anxiety Therapy Actually Involves

If you've never had therapy before, it's natural to feel apprehensive about what it actually entails. Here's what you can typically expect:

Initial Sessions: Assessment and Understanding

Your therapist will want to understand:

• Your specific anxiety symptoms and triggers
• How long you've been struggling
• Previous treatments or therapy you've tried
• Your family and relationship context
• Any trauma or significant life events
• Your goals for therapy

This isn't interrogation—it's collaborative exploration to understand what's driving your anxiety and what might help.

Ongoing Work: Multiple Approaches

Different therapists use different approaches, often combined:

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

• Identifying anxious thoughts and examining their validity
• Behavioural experiments to test predictions
• Gradual exposure to feared situations

Humanistic/Person-Centred Therapy

• Exploring underlying feelings and needs
• Building self-compassion
• Understanding how past experiences shape present anxiety

Psychodynamic Therapy

• Uncovering unconscious patterns
• Exploring how early relationships affect current anxiety
• Understanding defences and coping mechanisms

Somatic/Body-Based Work

• Nervous system regulation techniques
• Breathwork and grounding practices
• Processing anxiety held in the body

What a Session Looks Like:

A typical 50-minute anxiety therapy session might include:

• Checking in about your week and current state
• Exploring a specific anxious episode or pattern
• Learning a practical technique or insight
• Homework or experiments to try between sessions
• Processing feelings that arise during the session

Importantly, good anxiety therapy doesn't just give you tools—it helps you understand yourself more deeply.

How to Find Anxiety Support in London

NHS Options:

Talking Therapies (IAPT services)

• Free CBT-based treatment
• Self-referral online or via GP
• Usually 6-12 sessions
• Wait times vary (2 weeks to 3 months)

Private Therapy:

Finding an anxiety specialist:

• Search BACP or UKCP directories filtering for "anxiety"
• Look for therapists with specific training in anxiety disorders
• Consider both in-person and online options

Costs:

• Central London: £80-£150 per session
• Outer London: £60-£100
• Low-cost options: £20-£40 through charities

Questions to Ask Potential Therapists:

• "What's your experience working with anxiety?"
• "What approach do you use for anxiety treatment?"
• "How long does anxiety therapy typically take?"
• "Do you offer in-person, online, or both?"

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does anxiety therapy take?

This varies widely. Some people see significant improvement in 8-12 sessions of focused CBT. Others with more complex, long-standing anxiety might work with a therapist for 6-12 months or longer. Progress isn't always linear—expect ups and downs.

Will I have to relive traumatic experiences?

Only if there's trauma underlying your anxiety and you choose to work on it. Good therapists work at your pace and won't push you into overwhelm. Trauma processing happens when you feel safe enough.

What if talking about anxiety makes it worse?

Initially, focusing on anxiety can sometimes intensify awareness of it. This usually settles as you develop tools and understanding. Your therapist should help you manage this.

Can anxiety be cured, or will I always have it?

Most people don't completely eliminate anxiety (nor would you want to—some anxiety is protective). The goal is reducing it to manageable levels and changing your relationship with it so it doesn't control your life.

Should I try medication or therapy first?

This depends on severity and personal preference. Many people find a combination most helpful: medication for initial relief whilst therapy addresses underlying patterns. Discuss with your GP or psychiatrist.

What if I'm too anxious to even start therapy?

This is incredibly common. Start with a phone or email enquiry—you don't have to commit to anything. Many therapists offer a brief initial conversation to help you assess fit before booking.

Final Thoughts: You Don't Have to Live Like This

If you recognise yourself in several of these signs, please hear this: you're not being dramatic, oversensitive, or weak. Anxiety that impacts your quality of life deserves attention and support.

The hardest part is often admitting you need help. Once you're in the room (or on the video call) with a compassionate, skilled therapist, the work becomes more manageable.

You don't have to wait until you hit rock bottom. You don't have to prove your anxiety is "bad enough." If it's making your life harder or smaller than you want it to be, that's reason enough.

If you're in London and looking for anxiety therapy that combines practical tools with deeper understanding, I offer both in-person sessions in Fulham and online therapy. I work integratively, drawing from humanistic, person-centred, and transactional analysis approaches to tailor therapy to what you need.

The anxiety might whisper that you can't do this, that nothing will help, that you should just manage on your own. That's the anxiety talking, not the truth. There's a version of your life where anxiety doesn't run the show—and therapy can help you find it.