Understanding what triggers and maintains anxiety is the first step toward healing. Anxiety can feel overwhelming, confusing, and exhausting. It’s a mix of racing thoughts, tension, and constant alertness. It’s not just overthinking or worrying too much; it’s your mind and body trying to protect you in ways that can become hard to manage.
In fact, what many people don’t realise is that anxiety rarely comes from one single cause. It’s usually maintained by a mix of mental, emotional, and physical processes that keep feeding one another. Understanding these patterns helps you see that anxiety isn’t a personal failing, it’s something that makes sense once we understand how the mind and body are trying to keep us safe. Anxiety often continues because of a mix of factors like the ones below:
Intolerance of Uncertainty
Human beings naturally like to plan, predict, and prepare. When life feels uncertain, the mind often tries to regain control by imagining every possible outcome. This “what if” thinking might seem helpful at first, but it quickly turns into a loop that keeps the nervous system on high alert. The harder we try to think our way to certainty, the more anxious we feel. Therapy helps you learn to live with uncertainty rather than fight it, to respond with curiosity and calm instead of constant worry or judgment.
Low Sense of Capability
Anxiety often grows when we doubt our ability to cope with challenges. You might find yourself thinking, “I won’t be able to handle it” or “I’m not strong enough for this.” When we underestimate ourselves, the world feels more threatening, and our anxiety grows louder. Part of working through anxiety involves rebuilding trust in your own capacity. Therapy can help you rediscover that you do have the inner resources to meet life’s challenges and teach you how to use them. Once you build that self-trust that you can cope, the anxiety will ease.
Perfectionistic Standards
Perfectionism often hides underneath anxiety. When we expect ourselves to get everything right, every mistake can feel like a disaster. This pressure keeps our minds racing and our bodies tense. Over time, perfectionism becomes exhausting and can lead to burnout.
Learning to soften those expectations (i.e to see yourself as human and imperfect yet worthy), allows the body to relax. Therapy helps you develop a kinder, more balanced relationship with yourself so that self-worth isn’t tied to performance. As a result, your anxiety levels decrease.
Feeling Out of Control
A sense of control helps us feel safe. When life feels unpredictable or overwhelming, anxiety can surge. Sometimes it’s not the situation itself that creates fear, but the feeling that we can’t influence what happens next.
Through therapy, you can learn ways to regain a sense of steadiness from the inside out. This doesn’t mean controlling everything around you. It means finding grounding, learning emotional regulation skills, and discovering ways to respond to uncertainty without feeling powerless.
The Impact of Past Experiences
For some people, anxiety is linked to earlier experiences of fear, loss, or trauma. When the body has learned that the world is unsafe, it can stay on alert even after the danger has passed. Everyday situations may trigger the same physical reactions that once protected you.
Therapy offers a safe space for the mind and body to relearn what safety feels like. You don’t have to relive the past to heal from it; with gentle support, the nervous system can learn to relax again.
How Therapy Helps You Work Through Anxiety
Understanding anxiety is only the first step. Working through anxiety happens through experience, through learning new ways of relating to your thoughts, emotions, and body. My approach brings together several evidence-based therapies that complement each other and meet you where you are.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT helps you stop fighting your thoughts and feelings and start relating to them differently. Instead of trying to eliminate anxiety, you learn how to make space for it while focusing on what truly matters to you. Over time, this builds psychological flexibility : the ability to stay grounded and move forward, even when discomfort is present. Instead of being afraid of your anxiety, you develop the ability to understand the underlying unmet need it is trying to communicate. This guides you in the way that you look after yourself (i.e self-soothing/decision making), and you no longer consider anxiety as a threat.
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)
Many people with anxiety are incredibly hard on themselves. CFT helps you shift from harsh self-criticism to a gentler, more supportive inner voice. It teaches you how to activate your body’s natural soothing system through breathing, visualization, and compassionate awareness. When self-kindness replaces judgment, anxiety begins to lose its grip. This approach is particularly useful if you experience a lot of shame.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS views the mind as having different “parts,” each with its own feelings, fears, and intentions. Often, anxiety comes from protective parts that are trying to keep you safe. In therapy, we explore these parts with curiosity and compassion rather than trying to silence them. This process helps bring your inner world into balance and creates a sense of calm and harmony.
EMDR Therapy
When anxiety is connected to painful memories or trauma, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can be deeply effective. This approach helps the brain process and integrate those memories so they no longer trigger intense fear or distress. Clients often describe feeling lighter, clearer, and more at peace after EMDR sessions.
About the Author
Dr. Pauline Chiarizia is a Counselling Psychologist based in London specialising in trauma and its impact on emotional wellbeing. She offers online therapy and EMDR for individuals affected by anxiety, depression, PTSD, relational difficulties, and the lasting effects of difficult or overwhelming experiences.
She works with people who feel emotionally exhausted, persistently self-critical, or stuck in patterns that feel hard to change. Many of her clients carry the subtle but powerful impact of earlier relational experiences, even when there has been no single identifiable trauma.
Her approach is trauma-informed and evidence-based.
Therapy focuses not only on reducing symptoms, but on building internal stability, resilience, and a stronger sense of self-trust.
Dr. Chiarizia works with clients across the UK and internationally via online therapy.