Understand Your Anxiety
Recognize the thoughts, situations and patterns that trigger anxiety and understand what's happening beneath them.
Maybe you’re constantly thinking ahead, replaying conversations, preparing for what could go wrong or struggling to relax even when everything seems fine.
Anxiety therapy can help you understand what’s happening beneath the worry, recognize the patterns keeping you stuck and develop healthier ways of responding when anxiety shows up.
Sometimes anxiety looks like panic or intense fear. But it can also look like constantly planning ahead. Needing reassurance. Avoiding difficult conversations. Replaying decisions. Struggling to sit still. Keeping yourself busy because slowing down feels uncomfortable.
You might notice:
You can know logically that you’re okay and still feel like something isn’t.
Anxiety is part of the way your mind and body respond to uncertainty, risk and perceived threat.
The problem is that sometimes this protective system becomes overactive. Your mind starts looking for problems before they happen, your body stays prepared for danger and uncertainty begins to feel increasingly difficult to tolerate.
So you plan more. Think more. Avoid more. Ask for reassurance. Try to predict every possible outcome.
Those strategies may bring temporary relief—but they can also teach your mind that there really was something you needed protection from.
Therapy isn’t about telling you to “just stop worrying.” It’s about understanding the cycle well enough to respond differently.
Recognize the thoughts, situations and patterns that trigger anxiety and understand what's happening beneath them.
Develop healthier ways of responding when worry, physical tension or racing thoughts begin taking over.
Spend less time second-guessing decisions, seeking reassurance or trying to predict every possible outcome.
Spend less time caught in what might happen next and more time engaged with the relationships, experiences and things that matter now.
Anxiety can convince you that if you think about something for long enough, you’ll eventually find the answer that makes you feel completely certain. So you replay the conversation. Research one more thing. Imagine every possible outcome. Ask someone what they think. Make the decision – and then question whether it was the right one. The problem is that complete certainty rarely arrives. Instead, thinking becomes another way of trying to escape the discomfort of not knowing. Therapy can help you notice when useful problem-solving turns into anxious rumination – and practice allowing uncertainty without needing to resolve every possibility.
Anxiety can affect your body, relationships, sleep, work and the way you make everyday decisions.
You may notice yourself withdrawing from situations that make you uncomfortable, becoming impatient with people you care about or feeling physically exhausted after spending all day mentally preparing for things that never happen.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the anxiety itself.
It’s how much of your life begins organizing itself around avoiding it.
Therapy can help you make room for discomfort without allowing it to make every decision for you.
Practical strategies can be helpful, but Jeff’s approach also looks at what’s underneath the anxiety.
Together, you may explore the situations that trigger it, the patterns you’ve developed to manage uncertainty, the expectations you place on yourself and the experiences that may have shaped the way you respond to stress.
Jeff takes a relational and integrative approach, drawing from approaches including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness and psychodynamic therapy.
That means some sessions may involve practical ways of responding to anxiety in the moment, while others may explore why certain fears or patterns keep returning.
The goal isn’t a life without uncertainty. It’s feeling more capable of living your life when uncertainty is there.
You don’t need to wait until anxiety becomes overwhelming. If worry, overthinking, avoidance or physical tension is interfering with your life – or you’re simply tired of managing it alone – therapy may be worth exploring.
Yes. Therapy can help you recognize when productive thinking becomes rumination, understand what drives the need for certainty and develop different ways of responding to repetitive thoughts.
That’s okay. Sometimes anxiety has an obvious trigger and sometimes it doesn’t. Part of therapy can be understanding the situations, experiences and patterns contributing to what you’re feeling.
Anxiety can be associated with physical experiences such as muscle tension, restlessness, changes in breathing, digestive discomfort or difficulty sleeping. New or concerning physical symptoms should also be discussed with an appropriate medical professional.
Yes. Jeff provides online psychotherapy to adults located throughout California.