Anxiety Therapy in Mar Vista and Los Angeles
We all experience anxiety from time to time. Some of us may even experience the occasional moment of panic due to a current or impending event. These experiences may be quite normal. But when anxiety or panic begins to interfere with social obligations, previously enjoyable social plans, or day-to-day living in general: therapy can help. This includes assessments to determine if anxiety is due to an underlying medical or psychiatric condition.
Clients often indicate that anxiety distracts them from either joyful or more traumatic emotional experiences, leaving them with nothing more than increasing levels of anxiety over time. While every individual is different, anxiety tends to follow a set of rules which allow clinicians to determine how problems capture our minds, take us out of the present moment, with consistent disorienting results. We’ll gladly map the problems tied to anxiety to figure out the alternative options to better navigate life.
Seeing an Anxiety Therapist in Los Angeles
Anxiety is not unusual. Everyone meets it. What brings people to an anxiety therapist in Los Angeles is when it stops being occasional and starts making decisions on their behalf — which invitations get declined, which conversations get avoided, which opportunities quietly go unpursued.
It also does not always announce itself as worry. It often arrives physically first: shallow sleep, a tight chest, a clenched jaw, a stomach that reacts before you have consciously registered anything is wrong. People frequently see two or three doctors before anyone raises anxiety at all.
Where anxiety usually comes from
Anxiety tends to attach to something specific: performance, health, money, a relationship, a decision that has been deferred for months. Treating the sensation alone gives short-term relief. The work here goes after both — how to settle the body now, and what the anxiety is pointing at that has not yet been dealt with.
Anxiety is also one of the most common misreadings of undiagnosed adult ADHD. When rumination and overwhelm are the loudest symptoms, the anxious presentation is real, but treating it alone leaves the cause in place.
What sessions look like
Pragmatic and collaborative rather than abstract. Early sessions map when anxiety spikes, what precedes it, and what you currently do in response — including the strategies that reduce it in the moment and enlarge it over weeks. From there the work is on tolerance, on the avoidance loop, and on whatever the anxiety has been standing in front of.
Anxiety and low mood frequently travel together. If both are present, see depression therapy as well.
Getting started
Consultations are free and run 15 to 40 minutes. Call (310) 927-1755, email michael@michaelneetherapy.com, or use the contact page. The office is at 13101 W. Washington Boulevard, Suite 454, Los Angeles, CA 90066, in Mar Vista near the Culver City line, and telehealth is available anywhere in California.