When You Can’t Shut Your Own Mind Off
The worry doesn’t wait for a reason. It’s there when you wake up, and it’s still running at 3 a.m. when you’d give anything to sleep. Excessive worry, fear, a low hum of impending doom. You can’t sit still. You can’t slow it down. And underneath all of it is the thought you can’t shake: “I’m going to feel like this forever.”
If that’s where you are, you’re likely struggling with anxiety, and you’re not the only one living in that room.
A patient of mine once called his anxiety a fire he couldn’t put out. He kept dumping water on it, and it kept burning. I believe him, and I believe you. Feeling this way is awful, especially when you don’t know how to make it stop.
Anxiety Is a Fire – but Water Won’t Put It Out
There’s a way out. It just isn’t the thing you’ve been trying. You can’t out-worry your worry. You can’t think your way calm or white-knuckle your way to quiet, because the harder you push against anxiety, the bigger it gets. What actually works is a different kind of attention: slowing the loud, looping thought down enough to finally see what’s inside it.
Here’s what anxiety does. It makes a prediction – “I’ll fail, I can’t handle this, something terrible is coming” – and then it talks you out of ever testing whether that prediction is true. Most people stop right there, at the scary hypothesis, and never run the experiment.
That’s the work we do together. We slow the thought down, say it out loud, look at it honestly, and then go collect the real evidence. Anxiety is brilliant at making predictions and terrible at being right, and you deserve to find that out for yourself.
You Don’t Have to Find the Way Out Alone
You’ve probably pictured therapy as a stiff guy with a beard and a notepad, nodding while you talk. That’s not me, and most of my clients tell me I’m not what they expected.
I meet you where you are. I won’t ask you to meet me where I am.
We move at your pace, and I’ll be both warm and straight with you, because anxiety doesn’t respond to someone tiptoeing around it.
The path forward has been right in front of you the whole time, just hidden behind the fear. My job is to help you find it and then walk it with you until the worry no longer runs the show.
Imagine Coming Up for Air
Picture the noise in your head finally going quiet. A full night’s sleep. Sitting still without the urge to bolt out of your own skin.
Clients describe the moment it starts to lift like coming up to the surface of the water after holding their breath for a very long time.
That’s what’s on the other side of this. Relief first. And then underneath the relief, the thing you’ve really been missing: hope.
Take the First Step
It’s the hardest one, and it’s the only one I’m asking you to take today.
Call me, and let’s talk about what’s been keeping you up at night – and how we’d start quieting it down.
Call (561) 329-4827 today for help.