How I can help

Anxiety, overthinking, and not being able to switch off.

Area 01 · Anxiety

Anxiety, overthinking, and not being able to switch off.

Arrange an initial conversation or call 07799 563910
What anxiety can feel like

You may find it impossible to quieten your mind.

A woman reads calmly beneath an open casement window whose rigid iron bolt remains locked across the empty gap between sash and frame.

Anxiety rarely announces itself as fear. More often it’s a kind of background management — a low, continuous monitoring of what might go wrong, who might be upset, what’s been forgotten. The body is doing the work before the mind has named a threat: the tight chest, the shallow sleep, the sense of being braced against something that hasn’t happened and may never come.

What makes it so wearing is that it doesn’t feel optional. The vigilance feels like the only thing standing between you and disaster — to stop scanning would be to drop your guard, and some part of you is certain that dropping your guard is when the worst arrives.

The vigilance feels like the only thing standing between you and disaster.

A woman holds a door closed with her shoulder and both hands, though nothing is pushing against it.

So the watching continues.

A darkened room at night where the shadow of a sleeping figure remains sitting upright, still keeping watch.

So the watching continues, and it’s exhausting precisely because it never gets to rest.

Area 01 · Anxiety

Common experiences

A room of empty chairs where a single seat carries the compression of everyone who might sit down.
  1. Constant overthinking or worrying
  2. Difficulty switching off thoughts, especially at night
  3. Fear of being judged or getting things wrong
  4. People-pleasing and difficulty saying no
  5. Feeling overwhelmed by emotions or situations
  6. Low confidence or persistent self-doubt
  7. Physical symptoms: tension, shallow breathing, poor sleep

Few people arrive with all of these. Most recognise one or two — and find the others underneath as the work goes on.

A man sits still at a kitchen table while his body blurs with movement beneath a perfectly sharp head.

Overthinking is rarely just a thinking problem.

Where anxiety often comes from

Understanding what’s underneath it.

An older South Asian man works with papers in a book-lined study beside an old cast-iron balance scale whose two empty pans remain firmly tipped.

Most people who come with this have already tried a great deal on their own — the reading, the apps, the techniques, the willpower — and run each to its limit, only to find the anxiety outlasts them. That’s worth taking seriously rather than trying harder at.

Because anxiety isn’t a malfunction. It’s a system doing its job too well, in conditions it was calibrated for long ago. Somewhere, staying alert was genuinely the safest thing to be — reading the mood of a room, anticipating need, catching trouble early. The capacity that now exhausts you was once protective, even intelligent. It has simply gone on running after the danger it was built for has passed.

Anxiety isn’t a malfunction.

A young Black woman sews in a warm living room beside a small old wall sensor whose grille alone is densely frosted and iced.
How therapy helps

The work here isn’t another technique — safety is relational.

A woman tends a terraced-house garden beside a weathered cold frame whose detached glazed lid hovers level above healthy leaves, leaving open air on every side.

The work here isn’t another technique to add to the ones you already have. It’s slower, and it goes the other way — toward what the vigilance is still guarding, and whether, slowly, it can learn that the guarding is no longer required.

Somewhere to set it down.

Two women look through an open book at a wooden kitchen table, with a ceramic mug resting within concentric ripples formed in the solid tabletop.

This is, first, somewhere to set it down — to stop holding the alarm at arm’s length and bring it somewhere steady. That settling isn’t something willpower achieves; it happens as the nervous system comes to feel, rather than be told, that it’s safe. It’s relational — built in being met by someone who doesn’t need managing, where the part of you that’s always braced can begin to find that nothing is required of it here. Over time the scanning loosens, not because you’ve defeated it but because it’s no longer needed in the same way.

That space to rest.

A man sits at a wooden table, hands in his lap. On the table a small metal spinning top stands upright inside a circle of flour.

That space rests on something. More than twenty years of this work, much of it in residential mental health and addiction settings, sitting with people through the parts of themselves they were most afraid of. The room has held a great deal. It can hold what you bring to it.

If this feels familiar

It doesn’t have to be carried alone.

Anxiety that has built over years rarely yields to willpower — you’ve likely proved that already. What tends to ease isn’t the absence of all worry, but the return of choice: noticing the alarm and recognising it as an old signal rather than a present fact. Much of the exhaustion is the attempt to hold what was never yours to hold — and a good deal of relief comes simply from telling, more accurately, what is and isn’t within your hands.

admin@martinaldertoncounsellor.com 07799 563910
117 Harley Street, London W1G 6AS
Norwich NR2 · Online via Microsoft Teams
Two wooden chairs face each other in a sunlit room. A coat lies over one chair, and at its hem the cloth has become a heap of smooth stones.