LGBT and Child Therapist
in Los Angeles
Therapy For Anxiety in Los Angeles and Online
Is it a lump in the back of your throat? Is it uncontrollable negative self-talk? Do social interactions make you want to curl up in a ball and hide? Does the thought of making a mistake keep you from trying at all? Are you more familiar with worry than peace and quiet?
Anxiety can be a strong force because it leads us to believe we are protecting ourselves when we are actually continuing to fuel the anxiety. Anxiety doesn't have to win anymore. Facing anxiety is hard. But facing it one step at a time can start to break the cycle.
Breaking Down Anxiety
Types of Anxiety
There are 3 types of anxiety. Knowing which one impacts you the most, helps us to tackle the right triggers.
Social interactions become minefields where you constantly fear being judged, rejected, or humiliated. Your brain magnifies every glance, comment, or subtle reaction into potential evidence that others dislike you.
What others experience as casual conversations become for you high-stakes performances where you feel your entire worth is being evaluated, leading to exhausting self-monitoring.
Your worth becomes tied to performance which transforms doing ordinary tasks into tests of your value as a person.
You set impossibly high standards while simultaneously fearing you'll fall short, creating a paralyzing double-bind where starting feels as terrifying as failing.
Worry about anything becomes your constant companion, looping through your mind like a playlist stuck on repeat. You find yourself mentally rehearsing worst-case scenarios for situations that haven't
even happened yet, from minor daily tasks to distant future events.
This chronic overthinking can leave you mentally exhausted but paradoxically unable to rest, as your mind seems wired to scan for the next potential problem.
The 10 Rules of Anxiety
Anxiety makes us live by a set of rules that keep anxiety operating. However, when you know what the rules are, you can break them and change the game anxiety's been making you play. What rules are most familiar to you?
Intolerance of uncertainty is a core feature of anxiety disorders. The anxious mind cannot tolerate not knowing, so it demands complete certainty before taking action or feeling safe.
This rule captures what psychologists call "experiential avoidance," meaning you want to control or eliminate unwanted internal experiences, only to find they come back stronger and harder when you least want them.
This rule reflects the anxious mind becoming hypervigilant, scanning constantly for danger. Normal bodily sensations get interpreted as warning signs. Neutral situations seem menacing.
This rule operates through behavioral conditioning. When anxiety makes situations feel threatening, avoiding them brings relief. This relief reinforces avoidance, making it more likely you'll avoid similar situations in the future. Gradually, your world shrinks.
This rule involves metacognitive beliefs about thinking itself. The anxious mind believe that worrying prevents bad outcomes, that by mentally rehearsing disasters, you somehow protect against them.
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This rule describes how anxiety disrupts cognitive prioritization. Every worry, no matter how unlikely or trivial, gets tagged as urgent. The mind treats all negative possibilities as equally pressing concerns.
This rule reflects a cognitive distortion that makes us take responsibility for events outside our control. When something goes wrong, the anxious mind immediately assigns blame to the self, "I must have done something wrong."
This rule involves the belief that you lack the capability to handle challenges. Anxiety creates a form of amnesia about past successes and coping abilities, keeping us feeling small.
This rule drives us to constantly measure ourselves against others, chipping away at our self confidence and keeping us in an anxious state.
This rule describes how anxiety hijacks our predictive machinery. The human brain constantly generates predictions about the future, it's how we navigate the world. But anxiety biases these predictions towards catastrophe.