Is There a Cure for Anxiety? Or Are We Just Managing It?

It’s a fair question — and one I hear often.

Most mainstream anxiety treatments focus on management, not healing. You’re taught to cope, to self-soothe, to talk yourself down when anxiety strikes. But what if you could go deeper? What if, instead of managing your anxiety forever, you could unwire it from your system?

In my experience as a therapist, yes — anxiety can be cured. But not through logic alone. And definitely not by pretending your mind is the only part of you that matters.

Why We Get Stuck: The Anxiety Loop

Anxiety often becomes a neural loop — a patterned, automatic response in the brain and nervous system.

Example:

1. You have a panic attack in a classroom.

2. Your brain clocks “classroom” as dangerous (thanks, hippocampus).

3. Next time you approach a classroom, your body triggers anxiety — automatically.

Or something simpler:

1. Your boss criticises you, and you blush.

2. Now you blush every time you see your boss.

This is how strong emotional responses get hardwired in the limbic system — particularly the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear and survival. But just as the brain can learn fear, it can also unlearn it. This is where therapy that works with the body, the unconscious, and the nervous system becomes incredibly powerful.

Why the Usual Treatments Fall Short

The two most commonly prescribed treatments for anxiety are:

🔹 CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)🔹 SSRI or anti-anxiety medication

CBT is a cognitive approach that teaches you to manage anxiety by challenging and reframing unhelpful thoughts. It’s useful, but limited — because anxiety doesn’t start in the rational brain. It starts in the body.

SSRIs can help in the short term, especially when anxiety is intense, but they treat symptoms — not causes. Many people experience side effects or find that their anxiety escalates before it improves.

And here’s the kicker: anxiety is often automatic. You don’t choose to feel it. It switches on — and you’re left trying to calm something your rational brain didn’t start. That’s why CBT, which focuses on post-fact reasoning, often can’t access the core of the problem.

My Approach: Healing Anxiety at the Root

I don’t manage anxiety. I help people heal it — through an integrative mix of therapies that work with the nervous system, the subconscious, and the emotional memory stored in the body.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

🔹 1. A Clear, Compassionate Assessment

In our first session, I’ll take a detailed history and map your anxiety symptoms. Together we identify when your nervous system first learned to go into hypervigilance. Was there a key moment — a trauma, an illness, a major life change — where your body learnt to react with anxiety?

We’ll build a clear picture of your timeline and goals — so we know what we’re treating, and where we’re heading.

🔹 2. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)

When anxiety is rooted in trauma, EMDR is one of the most effective treatments available. It helps the brain reprocess overwhelming events so that the emotional charge is released, but the memory remains.

This is incredibly freeing. You can remember what happened without reliving it — and your body stops reacting like it’s happening all over again.

🔹 3. NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

While I’m selective with NLP, it offers some powerful tools. One I love: rewiring a trigger by layering new emotional states over old ones.

Say you feel anxiety walking into a room full of people. Using imagination and visualisation techniques, we "stack" calm, confidence, and ease over the original memory — until the brain stops associating the room with fear.

🔹 4. Hypnotherapy

Hypnosis is like guided meditation with a purpose — to retrain the unconscious mind. While you remain fully in control, I guide you into a deeply relaxed state where we can reprogram anxiety patterns, release old triggers, and install new, empowering beliefs.

In trance, we can:

• Meet the anxious part of you and understand what it needs

• Rehearse future calm scenarios, building new neural pathways

• Use gentle exposure to retrain your nervous system in safety

🔹 5. Somatic Therapy

Anxiety lives in the body — so we need to treat it through the body. In somatic sessions, we explore where anxiety is stored — chest, gut, heart — and how it moves or freezes. Where is your inner alarm and how can you soothe it? Is it unresolved child trauma?

Using breath, imagery, and mindful tracking, we teach your nervous system to move from unsafe to safe states. You’ll learn how to map your own body’s cues and truly relax at a physiological level.

6. Breathwork

We work with diaphragmatic breath — a science-backed way to flip your system from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest.” Just a few minutes of proper breathing can switch off a panic response. It's one of the most powerful self-regulation tools you’ll ever learn.

7. Inner Parts Work

Often, anxiety arises from inner conflict — a scared or traumatised child part, a harsh inner critic, a frightened protector. I help you connect with your wise adult self, the part of you that can lead, soothe, and create safety.

Through imagery, narrative re-writing, and symbolic work, we reintegrate disowned or wounded parts of the psyche — and anxiety naturally begins to dissolve.

So... Can Anxiety Be Cured?

In many cases: Yes.

When we say cured - it doesn't mean you will never have fight/flight again, it just means your dysregulated nervous system is now responding in a more normal way. Using a multi-facted approach - including therapy regular body work such as yoga , dietary changes, exercise, regular soothing breath work and changing your relationship to anxiety, so you no longer fight it or are afraid of it, you can certainly change how you respond to life.

When you work with the body, the unconscious, and the nervous system, the results are often profound.

Ready to Get to the Root of Your Anxiety?