Anxiety Therapy in Los Angeles
In-person in Los Angeles. Virtual across California, Nevada, and Oregon.
Modern, depth-oriented therapy for high-functioning anxious adults—the overthinkers, the perfectionists, the quietly exhausted.
You don't look anxious from the outside.
You're functioning. You're producing. You're showing up. The people in your life would probably describe you as together, capable, maybe even calm.
And underneath, you're exhausted.
The mental loop doesn't stop. The 2 a.m. wake-ups. The over-rehearsing. The faint, persistent feeling that something is about to go wrong. The way rest feels suspicious. The way achievement keeps not quite registering. The way your jaw is tight and your shoulders are tight and you haven't taken a full breath in weeks.
That's anxiety. Even when it doesn't look the way pop culture told you anxiety looks.
If you're considering anxiety therapy in Los Angeles, this is the page that tells you how I work, who I work with, and what real treatment actually involves.
What Burnout Actually Is
Anxiety gets used as a catch-all word for "stressed out." Clinically, it's more specific—and understanding the difference is part of what makes treatment work.
In therapy, we use the term anxiety to describe a physiological and psychological response to perceived threat—a state in which your nervous system is preparing for something to go wrong, even when nothing is actually happening.
The key features:
Physiological activation — elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, muscle tension, restlessness, disrupted sleep
Cognitive activation — racing thoughts, anticipatory thinking, rumination, hypervigilance, mental looping
Emotional activation — a sense of dread, unease, or "something is wrong" that often outlasts any specific trigger
Behavioral patterns — over-preparing, avoiding, controlling, overfunctioning, perfecting
What makes anxiety different from ordinary stress is that the activation doesn't reliably match the actual situation. You can be safe, supported, and successful—and your system can still be running like it's not.
This isn't a character flaw or a failure of mindset. It's a nervous system that learned, somewhere along the way, to scan for threat. Sometimes early in life. Sometimes from a specific event. Sometimes from years of operating in environments where vigilance was genuinely necessary.
The good news: anxiety is one of the most well-understood and treatable patterns in clinical psychology. The system can learn new information. The work just requires the right kind of attention.
My anxiety therapy practice in Los Angeles is focused on a specific kind of client:
High-functioning anxious adults whose anxiety doesn't disrupt their lives so much as quietly run them
Young professionals, founders, and creatives navigating success that costs more than it returns
Anxious overthinkers and perfectionists whose minds are both their greatest asset and their exhaustion
High achievers whose drive has become inseparable from their dread
People recovering from burnout who don't want a repeat
Adults in life transitions where anxiety has surfaced or intensified
The common thread: smart, capable people whose external lives look like they're working—and who are ready for their internal lives to actually match.
Who I Work With
The forms anxiety takes in my work:
High functioning anxiety — the kind that hides behind achievement and competence
Generalized anxiety — persistent worry that doesn't tie to any single thing
Overthinking and rumination — the loop that doesn't shut off
Anticipatory anxiety — rehearsing futures that haven't happened yet
Anxious perfectionism — using performance to manage internal threat
Panic and panic attacks — including the kind that started recently and the kind you've been managing for years
Social anxiety — particularly the high-functioning version that performs fine and depletes quietly
Relationship anxiety — when closeness itself becomes activating
Work-related anxiety and chronic stress — the precursor to burnout
Identity-driven anxiety — the kind that emerges during transitions, success, or unexpected stillness
If you're not sure where what you're experiencing fits, that's fine. Naming it is part of the work, not a prerequisite for starting.
What Anxiety Looks Like In My Practice
How Anxiety Therapy Actually Goes
A few things distinguish modern, depth-oriented anxiety therapy from the version most people picture.
It's not about managing symptoms forever.
A lot of anxiety treatment focuses on coping skills—breathing, grounding, thought-stopping, reframing. These tools have their place. But for people whose anxiety is deeply patterned, they often become another thing on the to-do list. You can optimize your way through them and feel no different at the core.
The goal isn't a longer list of techniques. The goal is needing them less.
We work with what's underneath.
Anxiety doesn't usually arise from nowhere. It's almost always the visible expression of something the system is doing—often something it's been doing for years.
In our work, we don't just address the anxious thoughts. We work with:
The early relational templates that shaped how your nervous system reads safety
The beliefs you've never said out loud—about worth, productivity, rest, being okay
The patterns underneath the anxiety: perfectionism, overfunctioning, hypervigilance
The physiological reality of an activated nervous system, and what it actually needs
This is what makes change durable rather than temporary.
Nervous system work is part of it.
Much of anxiety lives in the body. The mind is often the last to know.
We work with what's happening physiologically—real breath, real regulation, real downshifts—not as a wellness trend, but as clinical practice. You can't think your way out of an activated nervous system. You have to give it new information.
The relationship is the work.
Therapy isn't a series of techniques delivered to you. It's a relationship in which something can happen that hasn't happened before.
For people whose anxiety is relationally patterned (most people's is), the experience of being in a consistent, attuned, professional relationship is part of what shifts the underlying template. You don't have to do anything special. You just have to show up.
WHAT TO EXPECT IN SESSIONS
What sessions actually look like
Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly, in-person in Los Angeles or virtual across California, Nevada, and Oregon.
Early sessions focus on:
Understanding the specific shape your anxiety takes
Mapping the patterns that maintain it
Identifying what's actually been activating
Building working alliance and clinical fit
Later in the work:
Examining what's underneath the anxiety
Working with the nervous system in real time
Addressing the relational, identity, and historical factors driving the loop
Building new capacities—for rest, receiving, tolerating uncertainty, being yourself
The work isn't linear. Some sessions are practical. Some open something. Some feel quieter and turn out to have moved more than you realized.
HOW LONG THIS TAKES
How long burnout therapy usually takes
Honest answer: it depends on what you're working with.
Initial shifts in awareness often within the first month
Reduction in symptoms generally within the first three to six months
Deeper, structural change in the patterns underneath—often a year or more
Maintenance and integration beyond that, often at a less intensive cadence
Some clients come in for focused, time-limited work and move on. Others stay because the work keeps opening doors. Both are valid.
THE PRACTICAL DETAILS
In-person: Los Angeles
Virtual: California, Nevada, Oregon
Session length: 50 minutes
Frequency: Weekly (with occasional exceptions for what the work needs)
Format: Private-pay, with superbills available for potential out-of-network insurance reimbursement
Fees: Discussed in initial inquiry
If private-pay therapy is new to you, the short version: it protects your confidentiality, gives both of us clinical autonomy, and lets the work be directed by what you actually need rather than what insurance dictates.
A Final Note
If you've been telling yourself you'll get to it later—when work calms down, when this project ships, when things settle—I want to gently push back.
Things don't usually settle on their own. Patterns reinforce. Activation deepens. The cost of unaddressed anxiety isn't a single bill—it's the slow, quiet erosion of presence, pleasure, and self over time.
You don't need to be in crisis to deserve good therapy.
If you're considering anxiety therapy in Los Angeles, or virtual therapy across California, Nevada, or Oregon, I'd love to talk. A first consultation is the simplest way to find out if we're the right fit.