If anxiety has started to shape your days — what you avoid, how well you sleep, the conversations you rehearse before you have them — you are not overreacting and you are not alone. Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people come to counselling, and it is one of the most treatable.
I am a BACP Registered and BACP Accredited counsellor and psychotherapist with a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Leeds. I offer anxiety counselling in Leeds city centre (LS1). Sessions are a full hour, and I am currently accepting new clients with same-week appointments usually available.
To arrange a free, no-obligation ten-minute consultation, call or text 07921 101 505 or email tim@therapyuk.co.uk.
What anxiety actually feels like
Anxiety is the body’s threat response doing its job at the wrong moment. It is useful in short bursts — it sharpens attention and prepares you to act. The difficulty comes when it stays switched on: when the alarm keeps sounding long after any real danger has passed, or when it starts firing at things that were never dangerous in the first place.
People who come to me for anxiety counselling in Leeds often describe some combination of the following.
Physical signs of Anxiety
- A racing or pounding heart, or a sense of your chest tightening
- Shallow breathing, or the feeling you cannot get a full breath
- Persistent tension in the jaw, neck, shoulders or stomach
- Dizziness, nausea, or digestive problems with no clear medical cause
- Difficulty falling asleep, or waking in the early hours with your mind already running
- Exhaustion that rest does not seem to fix
Psychological signs of Anxiety
- Worry that loops that will not resolve, however much you think it through
- Catastrophising — the mind jumping to the worst possible outcome
- A constant background sense of dread, often without a specific cause you can name
- Difficulty concentrating, or losing your thread mid-sentence
- Feeling irritable, on edge, or unable to settle
- Intrusive thoughts that feel alarming or out of character
Behavioural signs of Anxiety
- Avoiding places, people or situations that used to be straightforward
- Over-preparing, over-checking, or seeking repeated reassurance
- Procrastinating on things that feel too exposing to start
- Drinking more, or leaning on other things to take the edge off
- Withdrawing from friends and family, then feeling worse for the isolation
You do not need to recognise all of these, and you do not need to be in crisis to benefit from counselling. If anxiety is costing you more than you want it to, that is reason enough.
Types of anxiety I work with
Anxiety takes different shapes in different people. Sessions are always tailored to what you are actually experiencing rather than to a label, but the difficulties clients bring most often include the following.
Generalised anxiety
Worry that moves from topic to topic — work, health, money, family — without ever really settling. There is rarely a single trigger, which can make it feel irrational and therefore harder to talk about. It is not irrational; it just is not attached to one thing.
Panic attacks
Sudden, intense surges of fear with strong physical symptoms — a hammering heart, breathlessness, shaking, a sense of unreality, or a conviction that something catastrophic is happening. Panic attacks are frightening but not dangerous, and a great deal of the distress comes from the fear of the next one. That cycle can be interrupted.
Social anxiety
Intense self-consciousness in social or professional situations: meetings, presentations, phone calls, or simply being in a room where you might be observed. It often comes with detailed after-the-fact replaying of what you said and how you came across.
Health anxiety
Persistent worry about your physical health, often accompanied by frequent body-checking, repeated GP visits, or hours lost to online symptom searching. Reassurance helps briefly and then wears off, which is exactly what keeps the pattern going.
Work and performance anxiety
Sunday-night dread, a sense of being permanently behind, or fear that you will be found out despite clear evidence of competence. Leeds is a demanding professional city, and this is one of the more common presentations I see.
Anxiety after a difficult experience
Bereavement, a relationship ending, redundancy, illness, or a frightening event can leave the nervous system braced long after the event itself. Anxiety here is often grief or shock that has not yet had anywhere to go.
How counselling helps with anxiety
Counselling is not advice-giving, and it is not someone telling you to stop worrying. It is a structured, confidential space in which anxiety can be understood rather than fought.
Most people arrive having already tried to manage anxiety alone — by reasoning with it, by avoiding what triggers it, or by pushing through and hoping it settles. These are understandable strategies, and they often work briefly. The trouble is that avoidance teaches the brain the threat was real, and reassurance-seeking needs topping up, so both quietly strengthen the thing they were meant to solve.
In sessions we work on several fronts at once:
- Understanding your particular pattern. What sets it off, what keeps it going, and what it costs you. Anxiety loses a surprising amount of its power once it becomes predictable.
- Working with the physical response. Practical, learnable ways of settling the body, so that a spike of anxiety becomes something you can ride out rather than something you have to escape.
- Examining the thinking. Anxious thought has recognisable habits — catastrophising, all-or-nothing reasoning, mind-reading. Naming them makes them easier to hold at arm’s length.
- Reducing avoidance at a pace you set. Gradually, and never as a test you can fail.
- Looking at the roots. For many people, anxiety has a history — early experiences, past relationships, or a period of prolonged stress. Understanding where it learned to be so vigilant often loosens its grip in the present.
Progress is rarely a straight line, and it is not measured by the total absence of anxiety. It is measured by anxiety taking up less room: sleeping better, saying yes to things again, recovering more quickly when it does flare.
My approach
I work integratively, which means I draw on more than one therapeutic model and shape the work around you rather than putting you through a fixed programme. In practice, anxiety work usually blends practical, structured techniques for managing symptoms with deeper exploration of where the anxiety comes from and what it is protecting you from.
I will not tell you what to do. I will listen carefully, help you put words to things that have been hard to articulate, and at times I will gently challenge you to look at something from a different angle.
Anxiety counselling in Leeds city centre
My therapy room is in Leeds city centre (LS1), with quiet views over the Leeds–Liverpool Canal and the River Aire. It is comfortable, private and easy to reach on foot from the city centre and from Leeds railway station, which makes it practical to fit a session around a working day.
I also see clients in York (YO41) and offer online counselling by video call across the UK. Online sessions are equally effective for anxiety and suit people who travel for work, have caring responsibilities, or simply find the journey itself a source of stress. Early morning and evening appointments are available.
Taking the first step
Getting in touch is often the hardest part, particularly when anxiety is the very thing making the call feel difficult. There is no pressure in that first conversation and no obligation to book anything.
Call or text 07921 101 505, email tim@therapyuk.co.uk, or use the enquiry form below to arrange your free ten-minute consultation. If I am in a session I will return your call as soon as I can.
Tim Arnott MA, BA (Hons), MBACP (Accred) — Registered and Accredited Counsellor & Psychotherapist
Anxiety counselling Leeds — Tim Arnott, BACP Accredited counsellor