Anxiety therapy in Bromley

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is the mind and body’s response to a perceived threat, showing up as persistent worry, physical tension or a sense of dread that outlasts the situation causing it. Occasional anxiety passes once a stressful period ends. When it becomes constant and starts affecting sleep, concentration or daily life, this is usually described as an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety sits on a spectrum. A small amount is a normal and useful signal, the nervous system preparing you to respond to something difficult. Problems tend to build when that alarm response fires too often, too intensely, or without a clear trigger, so that everyday situations such as replying to an email, travelling into London or making a phone call start to feel threatening. Anxiety is one of the most common reasons adults seek psychological therapy in the UK, and it tends to respond well to a structured approach.

Symptoms of anxiety

Anxiety shows up differently from person to person, but common patterns include:

• Physical: a racing heart, tight chest, shallow breathing, muscle tension, headaches, nausea or disturbed sleep.
• Cognitive: repetitive worrying thoughts, difficulty concentrating, catastrophising about what might go wrong, or a persistent sense of dread.
• Behavioural: avoiding certain places, people or situations, seeking frequent reassurance, checking behaviours, or cancelling plans at short notice.

These symptoms can appear together or on their own, and their intensity often shifts with stress, sleep and workload. A pattern that feels manageable one month can feel overwhelming the next, even without an obvious change in circumstances.

Types of anxiety

Anxiety is not one single condition. Generalised anxiety disorder involves persistent, hard to control worry about several areas of life at once, often with no single obvious cause. Panic disorder involves sudden, intense episodes of fear accompanied by strong physical symptoms, sometimes leading to a fear of the panic attacks themselves. Social anxiety centres on a fear of judgement or embarrassment in social or performance situations. Health anxiety involves persistent worry about illness, often alongside frequent checking or reassurance seeking. Specific phobias are a marked fear of a particular object or situation, such as flying or injections.

Some people recognise features of more than one of these. Anxiety can also sit alongside other difficulties, such as low mood or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is why assessment looks at the whole picture rather than a single symptom in isolation. Part of an initial assessment is working out which pattern, or combination of patterns, most closely fits your experience, rather than you needing to arrive with a fixed label.

How therapy can help

Talking therapy gives anxiety a structure to work with, rather than leaving it to run in the background. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and social anxiety, and looks at how thoughts, physical sensations and behaviour keep an anxiety cycle going. Other approaches, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), can also be useful, particularly where avoidance has built up around specific situations over time.

Change is not always linear. Symptoms can ease unevenly, with setbacks alongside progress, and part of the psychologist’s role is helping you make sense of that pattern rather than expecting a straight line of improvement. A clinical psychologist will assess which approach fits your particular pattern of anxiety, rather than applying the same method to everyone who comes through the door.

Our approach

As clinical psychologists working online with adults across Bromley and south east London, we hold sessions by secure video call rather than in a waiting room. This means you can speak to a psychologist from home, from work during a lunch break, or anywhere private with a stable connection, without needing to travel into central Bromley or find parking near The Glades. This suits people across Bromley, Beckenham, Chislehurst, Shortlands, Bickley, Hayes and Petts Wood, including anyone commuting from Bromley South or Bromley North station who would rather not add a further trip into a clinic on top of the day. We will update this site as the practice develops.

Every assessment is tailored to the person in front of us. Two adults with the same generalised anxiety diagnosis can have very different triggers, histories and daily patterns, and therapy tends to help most when it reflects that difference rather than following a fixed script.

What does anxiety therapy involve?

Therapy usually starts with an assessment session, where the psychologist asks about your current symptoms, how long they have been present, what tends to trigger or ease them, and what you would like to change. From there, sessions typically follow a regular weekly or fortnightly rhythm, each lasting around fifty minutes.

Early sessions focus on understanding the pattern behind your anxiety. Later sessions introduce specific techniques, such as examining anxious thoughts, gradually approaching avoided situations, or building tolerance for uncertainty. Some psychologists also use short questionnaires at intervals to track symptoms over time, so that both of you have a clear sense of what is changing, alongside how you feel session to session. Between sessions you may be asked to try small, agreed exercises, since anxiety therapy tends to work through practice as well as conversation, and change often happens gradually rather than all at once.

Frequently asked questions

Below are answers to some of the questions people in Bromley and the surrounding area most often ask before starting anxiety therapy.

When to seek help

Anxiety does not need to reach crisis point before it is worth discussing with a professional. It is worth speaking to someone if anxiety has lasted for several weeks, is affecting your sleep, work or relationships, or if you have started avoiding ordinary situations to manage how you feel. You do not need a diagnosis before getting in touch.

If you are in crisis, at risk of harming yourself, or need urgent support, contact 999, NHS 111, or the Samaritans free on 116 123, since this falls outside what online talking therapy can offer in the moment.