Anxiety Therapy That Goes Upstream, Not Just to the Symptoms

Most approaches address the outputs: the racing thoughts, the chest tightness, the sleep that will not come. This work goes to where the anxiety is actually generated.

What Sessions Look Like

Sessions are 50 minutes, held weekly or biweekly, available in person in Menlo Park or online throughout California. We start with a free 15-minute call where you can ask whatever you need to before deciding if this is the right fit. No commitment required to have that conversation.

The work is specific and goal-oriented, not open-ended processing that circles the same terrain without direction. Together, we identify the structure of your anxiety:

• Where the hypervigilance originates

• What your nervous system is still protecting you from

• Why a mechanism that served you so well has become difficult to switch off

An Approach Built for How You Actually Think

Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety is a foundation of this work. It is one of the most extensively researched treatments available, with documented efficacy across decades of controlled trials. Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety targets the specific thought patterns keeping the spiral running and restructures them at the source. The changes are measurable and they hold over time.

Most clients notice meaningful change within three to six months. The spiral that used to run for two hours loses momentum in twenty minutes. Decisions that used to require extra rounds of review come through cleaner.

A More Direct Path When the Pattern Runs Deep

I also draw on Accelerated Resolution Therapy when the anxiety is rooted in something the nervous system is still holding from the past. Recognized by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as an evidence-based treatment, Accelerated Resolution Therapy works directly with the nervous system, targeting where anxiety is stored in the body rather than relying on verbal re-examination alone. Meaningful, lasting shifts can occur in as few as one to five sessions. The changes hold because they happen at the level where anxiety actually originates.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent years inside high-growth technology and venture-backed environments. I understand the specific logic that keeps you from addressing this: there is always a more pressing priority, always a better time, always a reason that right now is not it. That professional context is part of every session.

You May Have Questions Before Reaching Out

Everyone at my level feels this way. This is just the cost of doing what I do.

That thought contains a partial truth, which is exactly what makes it effective at preventing action. Some degree of alertness is inherent to performing at your level.

But there is a meaningful difference between appropriate situational awareness and a nervous system that cannot distinguish a genuine threat from a calendar notification. One is a professional asset. The other is a health cost that compounds quietly over years.

My anxiety is part of what makes me effective. I am not willing to lose my edge.

The edge is not the anxiety. The edge is the intelligence, pattern recognition, and situational awareness you have developed. Those do not disappear when anxiety is addressed.

What disappears is the chronic background urgency burning fuel without useful output. Most clients find their judgment sharpens rather than softens, because it is no longer competing with a threat response running underneath everything.

I cannot have this affect how I am perceived professionally.

This practice operates entirely outside the insurance system. Nothing about your sessions, your diagnosis, or the fact that you came here is ever submitted to a carrier or entered into any external claims system. For people whose professional standing represents a meaningful asset, that structure is not incidental. It is the point.

What This Has Looked Like for Others

A physician promoted to department head came in eight months into the new role. She was sleeping four hours a night and watching the relationships that mattered to her erode. Partners described her as absent despite always being in the room.

What emerged in sessions was the specific history that had made constant readiness feel synonymous with responsibility. That restlessness had served a real purpose once. It simply never received the message that the conditions had changed.

The first shift she noticed was that she stopped snapping. Not all at once, but enough to register. Then presence came back. She started finishing conversations without mentally drafting the next one before the current one ended. She took her first fully disconnected vacation in over a decade and did not check in once. When she returned, a colleague told her she seemed lighter. She knew exactly what that meant. She had stopped mistaking anxiety for conscientiousness. The precision that had always made her exceptional was still there. It just no longer cost her everything outside the hospital to maintain it.

A managing partner at a Sand Hill Road venture firm came in after his daughter asked when was the last time he had actually been present with her. He did not have an answer. The anxiety had migrated from target to target for years, funding rounds, board dynamics, portfolio risk, and he had long since mistaken the motion for engagement.

About four months in, his daughter said something offhand that stopped him. She told him he seemed different. That when they talked now, he was actually there. His schedule had not changed. His internal setting had.

The shift showed up at work in ways he had not anticipated. Decisions came through cleaner. The extra rounds of review he had always added as insurance became unnecessary. Not because the uncertainty went away. Because he could finally sit with it longer without needing to resolve it before it was ready. He described it not as feeling calmer, but as feeling more like himself. The intensity was still there. It was just no longer running everything. That distinction, he said, was larger than he had expected.

The Urgency You Apply to Everything Else Belongs Here Too

Anxiety that goes unaddressed does not stay contained at its current level. It finds new places to settle: in the quality of sleep, in the distance that slowly opens between you and the people who matter most, in the quiet recognition that what you have been working this hard for is only half-lived.

Getting started with anxiety therapy in Menlo Park is straightforward. A free 15-minute call. No paperwork. No performance. No obligation.