Anxiety is the fear of being afraid. It is best described as a kind of “worry about fear itself”. I like to think of it as a kind of “free-floating uneasiness” that shows up unconsciously. Eventually, becoming conscious through a variety of bodily sensations, which I’ll describe in a moment. Anxiety is a common response to uncertainty or the perception of danger or threat. Anxiety arises from natural cues delivered through our amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in the center of our brain. It’s the origin of our instincts for “flight, fight, or freeze” that seek to protect us when we sense danger.

A certain amount of anxiety is normal. We are, after all, sensing animals. Alert to the danger of being attacked or hurt in some way for thousands of years. For healthy people, this subtle kind of fear sensation rests in the background. It helps us to process stimuli without intrusive thoughts and excessive reactivity. Imagine a tiger walking through a forest. Tigers do not, as far as we know, experience anxiety. Their behavior suggests this strongly.

She may experience fear, all animals do, but without the “excessive thinking component that weakens”. Observe the deliberate way she walks, carefully noticing movement, sounds, and smells all around. She seems to know that it is unskillful to panic or overreact to stimuli. Always keeping her attention in check, ready to defend or to seek prey. Meditators know this powerful sense of presence from the practice. Meditation trains their minds to relax and stay open and observant. We’ll talk about this later in our article.

What Are the Symptoms of Anxiety?

Excessive anxiety may first occur as sensations in the body, like tightness in the chest or abdomen or forearms, increased heart rate. It can include feelings of lightheadedness, sweating, and restlessness. These sensations come to us unbidden from our subconscious self-protection system. Always sensing our environment for threats, the body is constantly making its own decision as to whether a person, event, or situation is safe/not safe.

Anxiety shows up as self-doubt, hyper vigilance toward the opinion of others, and loss of confidence in our ability to carry out important tasks. Emotionally, it can cause us to become uneasy or on edge, making us irritable or easily overwhelmed. It can remain constant as a strong need for reassurance or control.

What are the Benefits of Anxiety Therapy?

Anxiety therapy can create a stronger mind by restoring self-confidence and eliminating pervasive second-guessing of oneself. It can restore clear and deliberate thinking while it reduces the heightened physical sensations that elevate our emotions of fear and dread. In strengthening the mind, anxiety therapy elevates our ability to live skillfully in the present moment. Enjoying sights, sounds, touch, tastes, and smells that are all around us, formerly beyond our consciousness. Clients gain clarity in their thinking and ability to quickly evaluate people and situations by refraining from “overthink”.

With practice, pervasive worry and dread fall away because they are no longer useful. Our bodies relax naturally when freed from being constantly “alerted” by our worried minds. Anxiety therapy can produce more restful sleep as we learn to train the body to slow down naturally. Without the use of drugs, alcohol or other substances. Regardless of age, one can become happier naturally, experiencing greater satisfaction in the ordinary pleasures of the world. Especially the joy of relationships with parents, siblings, spouses, children, and close friends.

Why Might Someone Seek Therapy for Anxiety?

To illustrate the reasons someone would seek anxiety therapy, I’ll share some vignettes from my Delray Beach counseling practice. And of course, the names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. Some of the cases mentioned are composites of those I’ve worked with in the past. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or situations, past or present, is purely coincidental.

Failure to Launch

Grace sought counseling after graduation from college. She’d returned home after a series of employment and relationship failures shook her sense of who she was. She appeared nervous before me, a sheen of perspiration coating her forehead. Her voice rose and fell in a childlike way as she struggled to tell her story. Pausing for long intervals frequently as she appeared to gather her thoughts to continue. Her gaze would drift away as she seemed to struggle to stay present with me while narrating her history. She’d grown up as an only child after being abandoned by her birth mother at three years old.

Her birth mother, troubled by various addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, subsequently disappeared altogether, never to reappear. Grace’s father supported her and did his best, but never nurtured a close relationship with his only daughter. Her stepmother eventually adopted her and tried mightily to support and give her what she needed. But with a drinking problem of her own, she often resented Grace’s presence in their home and felt she competed with her for her husband’s attention. Her stepmother simply tolerated her and couldn’t help but make it known that Grace was a problem. Grace “fell between the cracks” of parental caring and oversight. While there was plenty of money, wealth even, Grace never felt loved and supported. She grew anxious over the years and constantly questioned her self-worth and second-guessed her abilities.

Other Mental Health Connections

She suffered from severe ADD and was often distracted while studying and even during social conversations. High school had been challenging for her, and college was no different. With pluck and determination, she graduated, but with a poor grade average that further confirmed her low opinion of herself. Her anxiety was profound. It affected every aspect of her young life, especially social and intimate relationships. By the time she sought our help, she was beginning to show signs of agoraphobia, a fear of going out of the home. Mostly unemployed, she stayed home and drank heavily. She had food and other goods delivered. She relied on her parents’ generosity to pay her bills, making her feel worse. After being fired from her second important job since graduating from college, Grace came for anxiety therapy help.

Family Abuse and Low Self-Esteem

Another client in our Delray Beach anxiety therapy practice was older. Phil, at 55, was having trouble in an outside sales role for a technology company when he sought my help. He’d been tracking his blood pressure and found it consistently elevated in the recent weeks. He’d been trying on the advice of his doctor to reduce or eliminate his drinking for months without success. Phil had become a functioning alcoholic and relied on several cocktails each night to calm his nerves. He never dated without “preparing himself” at home with fortifications of alcohol. Meeting prospective sales clients was getting harder all the time. After his production took a steep decline, he started applying for less pressurized roles working inside the same company.

His anxiety seemed to precede him in every social interaction. He often had people interrupt conversations to ask him if he was okay. He seemed to always carry a serious and dour look on his face, as if something was bothering him he couldn’t explain. Phil had grown up in a lower-middle working-class neighborhood with an alcoholic father prone to fits of temper, yelling, and domestic abuse.

A sensitive and fair-haired child, Phil became the object of his father’s ridicule as early as he could remember. Phil was teased for his effeminate nature and for being a lightweight at sports. He withdrew early from friends and family, especially his father. He grew socially awkward through middle and high school, finding dating and social connections all but impossible. In his mind, he found “echoes” of his father’s punitive voice that showed up as nightmares and intrusive thinking during waking hours. He could almost hear his father’s loud, scolding, and angry voice. Constantly criticizing Phil for his failures to meet his father’s expectations.

The Urge to Self-Medicate

The self-limiting beliefs that form around such abusive treatment are referred to as “introjects.” They may stay with a person for a lifetime, often out of conscious awareness. By the time he reached college, Phil’s anxiety and alcoholism were in full bloom. During one session, he related an embarrassing episode during a fraternity party in which he got very drunk and high.

Feeling himself the life of the party, he donned a lampshade, climbed atop a table, and proceeded to serenade the crowd. Karaoke-style, at the top of his lungs. His shame kicked in hard when friends told him what a fool he’d been and what had happened the previous night. He’d been “blackout drunk” and unaware of his behavior. An alcohol-related blackout involves losing your memory while you’re still awake and conscious. During a blackout, you can move around, interact with others, and seem fine to those around you.

Phil used alcohol constantly to diminish his social anxiety, easing up, if at all, when doctors warned him of the health dangers he was tempting. High stress situations, such as dating and sales calls, often brought sensations of dizziness, faint headedness, and increased heart rate. During our second session, as he related his history, Phil experienced a panic attack and had to lie down to manage it.

Relationship Ramifications

Dating was difficult and uncomfortable for Phil, and he never married. By his mid-thirties, he’d become adept at finding sex online. He preferred to pay prostitutes for the companionship he felt so hungry for. To soothe his constant anxiety, Phil would often call in “hook-ups’ during the day, dismissing the prostitute after she’d serviced his sexual needs. He’d developed a fairly robust sex addiction this way. He found it next to impossible to break the habit of paying for sex.

As he’d grown older, he reported increasingly wanting to settle down, find a companion he could live and travel with. But his shortfall of social skills, along with formidable anxiety aroused while dating, seemed to confound and defeat him. Phil was referred to us by his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. He’d been working closely with Phil to help him stay sober. Of course, with the removal of alcohol as a form of “self-medication”, his anxiety spiked to nearly unmanageable levels.

Anxiety and Failed Relationships from ADHD

Jim finally sought my help after several panic attacks led him to the same doctor who saved his life during a heart attack the year before. Jim was a wildly successful property developer/builder with a very long and impressive resume. He’d been a Wall Street whiz kid and progressed into the management of wealth and the development of large tracts of commercial districts. I noted a curious detail on our intake call when, in an effort to tell me about himself, he disclosed that he owned a famous South Florida property with a marquee name. To have owned it would mean that the man I was talking to was more than a multi-millionaire. I wondered if I was getting ready to deal with a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which I frequently see.

We were conducting a pre-session evaluation and consultation that I often employ in my Delray Beach anxiety therapy practice. After seeing his doctor, Jim had been referred to me by his wife of 20 years, who was preparing for a divorce. A practicing internist herself, she’d grown weary of a marriage that contained little nourishment for her and a world of at-home work raising five children. She had also disclosed painfully during our private intake call that she’d become aware of Jim’s multiple affairs several months prior. She wasn’t sure the marriage would survive. If he were willing to meet with me and join her to do the couple’s work, she’d give it a try. But first, he had to engage. And he wasted no time contacting me.

The Pressure to Perform

Jim had grown up as the youngest child in a family of seven children. His father was a U.S. senator, and his mother had been a lobbyist. High standards defined this family. All of Jim’s siblings had become successful as architects, physicians, and financiers. During our first live conversation, it would be nearly half of the hour before I finally got the chance to speak, and then only in confirmation of the things I was hearing. No doubt, Jim was brilliant. His mind raced, and his foot never ceased tapping as he told me about one accomplishment after another. It was clear that I was watching someone with severe ADHD, with an emphasis on the H, standing for hyperactive. Jim moved back and forth in his chair and moved his legs incessantly. He gesticulated with pressured speech that left no room for conversation.

The Anxiety/ ADHD Connection

ADHD is often associated with high anxiety. When someone struggles with organization, attention, or impulsivity, they often experience worry about forgetting, frequent social embarrassment, and underperformance in school or at work. This chronic stress can evolve into anxiety. For Jim, all of these conditions had existed his entire life. Jim was never academically successful because of his learning difficulty. He had thrown himself into statistics and numbers with the intensity of a savant. Often, someone with this kind of heightened cognitive/emotional style will “hyper focus” as a technique of self-soothing.

This was Jim’s life-saving strategy. At work. His home life was disastrous. Regularly working more than 60 hours per week, he admitted dismissively with a sheepish grin in our intake that he was a “work-a-holic”. When he finally brought up the affairs he’d had, it was without emotion. With a busy work life and an equally busy spouse, he’d simply chosen to (his words) “out-source” his sexual needs when needed. Jim’s foot never stopped tapping.

Anxiety FAQs

Ours is a Holistic Approach to Anxiety Therapy

As an experienced anxiety therapist in Delray Beach, I take a holistic approach to anxiety treatment. The “whole person” is involved in every healing process, including the thinking mind, the emotional heart, and the always-present body. We explore the interconnectedness of all of these, finding strength and healing power that becomes more than a sum of parts.

Our initial discussions strive to “normalize” the experience of anxiety by sharing its prevalence in our culture and discussing the ways in which our fast, mobile lifestyles tend to enhance our experience of “worrying about fear” for all of us. Of course, normal is relative, and everyone’s experience in our culture is unique. That’s why it’s so important to learn about a person’s history, including many conditions such as poverty and wealth, education or lack of it, harmony in the home, or the presence of tension and strife.

History is Critical

Alongside current difficulties, the presence of Adverse Childhood Experiences is critically important. By “adverse”, we simply mean potentially traumatic childhood incidents or conditions that may have overwhelmed someone’s ability to cope in a way that has left a lasting negative impression. These stressful, negative experiences affect the individual’s emotional stability and their ability to self-regulate, especially in mood and feeling. Violence, divorce, abuse, abandonment, neglect, homelessness, and poverty, family mental illness (especially parental), incarceration, and molestation are all examples of conditions that will have long-lasting effects on growth and development in one’s life.

Anxiety is a predictable symptom of all of these experiences, and the memories of such are the working basis of anxiety therapy. The original ACE’s Study by Felitti et al is a thorough examination of the effects of all these experiences of childhood adversity and has been the guiding body of research for many years. It clearly demonstrates the strong correlation between adversity in childhood and mental and physical suffering later in life, chief among those symptoms being high anxiety and depression. Exploring the origins of someone’s discomfort and dysregulation leads us to the tools most appropriate for healing each person on a uniquely individual basis.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Insight-oriented psychotherapy involves talking about oneself in the presence of a trusted and skillful therapist in order to develop new awareness of ourselves and how our history has caused us to think and feel. CBT, the best talk therapy, is our most widely used modality at John Davis Counseling, Inc. in Delray Beach, Florida. It is the most robust, evidence-based practice protocol in psychotherapy today. We place our trust in the reliable and predictable outcomes obtained when a person commits to the shift in thinking and behavior invited by CBT. Dr Aaron Beck developed CBT during the 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania. Its inception was likely the most effective paradigm shift in the history of anxiety therapy. Very simply described, this therapy seeks to identify the automatic thoughts that arise when a person encounters adversity, evaluate them carefully, and then change that person’s thinking and emotional/behavioral reactions.

Practical Homework

We strive to make each session as impactful as possible and accompany those sessions with practices outside of therapy. This usually includes keeping track, sometimes on paper, of moments of discomfort that heighten anxiety and pausing to analyze the thoughts and emotions that accompany those moments. Tracking and analyzing behaviors that follow can provide a “road map” for a person’s growth and healing. These become the tools of anxiety therapy and will inform us how we proceed with each person.

The Body Keeps the Score

Always, when working with clients, we remain keenly aware of how anxiety shows up in the body. The experience of fear, even childhood adversity-based, can cause our muscles to contract and remain constricted throughout an experience and even beyond it. Excess tension that remains in the body becomes toxic over time. Think of a security guard who stands at rigid attention for prolonged periods, and the stress that is experienced thereby, weakening muscles, clouding attention, and lengthening response times as fatigue takes over and diminishes resilience.

This is often a metaphor that resonates with many of our clients who find that they’ve been “on guard” or “hyper-vigilant” in their minds since childhood. Relaxation exercises and deep breathing protocols are very effective at bringing a person’s awareness away from anxiety-producing thoughts of regret and worry and stimulating a calm and grounded mindset from which to solve problems. In combination with CBT, we frequently use body-based procedures such as EMDR, hypnosis, and guided meditation in our work with anxiety.

Learn More About Anxiety

Find Relief and Restore Peace Through Anxiety Therapy in Delray Beach, FL

Living with anxiety can feel overwhelming. Your mind races, your body stays on high alert, and everyday tasks can suddenly feel impossible. But you don’t have to navigate this alone. Anxiety therapy offers a supportive, structured environment where you can understand your triggers, calm your nervous system, and regain a sense of control in your daily life. At my Delray Beach therapy practice, I help clients replace fear-driven patterns with practical tools that foster clarity, emotional resilience, and a renewed sense of calm.

Here’s how you can begin your path toward healing and stability:

• 1. Schedule a confidential consultation to explore how anxiety is affecting your life and well-being.
• 2. Learn evidence-based strategies to manage anxious thoughts and regulate your emotions with guidance from an experienced anxiety therapist in Delray Beach, FL.
• 3. Build a healthier, steadier foundation for your mental and emotional health—one grounded in confidence, balance, and lasting inner peace.

Other Therapy Services John David Provides in Delray Beach, Florida

Whether you’re struggling with chronic worry, panic attacks, or the physical toll of long-term stress, anxiety therapy can help you build the skills needed to feel grounded and in control again. I also know that anxiety rarely exists in isolation. It often shows up alongside stress, burnout, unresolved trauma, or major life transitions. That’s why I offer a comprehensive range of counseling services designed to support your emotional well-being from multiple angles.

In addition to anxiety therapy, my Delray Beach practice provides relationship therapy, couples counseling, trauma therapy, addiction treatment, grief counseling, and support for NPD. I also work with clients facing ADHD/ADD, impulse-control issues, and spiritual concerns. Each treatment plan is fully personalized, using an integrative approach that may include CBT, EMDR, Gestalt therapy, mindfulness practices, psychodrama, or clinical hypnosis, depending on your unique needs and goals.

My mission is to help you build long-term emotional resilience, strengthen your coping strategies, and reclaim a sense of peace and stability in your daily life. I invite you to explore my blog for additional resources and contact my office directly to schedule your consultation.

About the Author

John Davis, LMHC, is a seasoned mental health counselor in Delray Beach, FL, specializing in anxiety treatment and trauma-informed care. With extensive experience helping individuals navigate chronic stress, panic, intrusive thoughts, and the emotional impact of past trauma, John is committed to empowering clients with tools that calm the mind and restore balance. Drawing from modalities such as EMDR, CBT, mindfulness, Gestalt therapy, and psychodrama, John creates a personalized, supportive environment for deep healing and emotional growth.

His background in child and family therapy helps him understand how early experiences shape the anxiety patterns people carry into adulthood—and how to gently unwind them. As the Executive Director of the Mental Health Counselors’ Association of Palm Beach, a recipient of the Outstanding Community Service Award, and an expert featured on StayMarriedFlorida.com, John is widely recognized for his leadership, compassion, and dedication to mental health. His work continues to help clients overcome anxiety, rebuild resilience, and experience meaningful, lasting change.