Anxiety Therapy
Are You Living With Constant Worry or Pressure?
If you find yourself replaying conversations, struggling to slow your thoughts, or feeling like you’re always on edge, you’re not alone. Many men carry a quiet, constant pressure. The sense that you have to hold everything together, even when you’re running on empty. Anxiety can show up as tension in your chest, trouble sleeping, irritability, or a short fuse. It can also feel like you’re trapped in your own head, worrying about things you can’t control.
Anxiety doesn’t always look like panic. Sometimes it comes as restlessness, overthinking, or the feeling that you’re never doing enough. It can impact your work, your relationships, and your ability to be present and enjoy life, slowly wearing you down over time.
At Wild North Men’s Therapy, we take anxiety seriously because beneath it there’s often more than worry. There may be fear of failure, struggles with worthiness, or buried emotion that is pushing its way to the surface- to be seen, heard, and felt.
Why Men Experience Anxiety
For many men, anxiety is connected to the pressure to perform, protect, and provide. You might feel that your worth depends on your ability to succeed, stay composed, or fix problems on your own. Cultural expectations around strength and independence can make it difficult to admit when you’re struggling or to ask for help. Over time, these pressures can build beneath the surface.
In relationships, a lot of men end up in constant damage control mode, focusing on their partner’s well-being while rarely slowing down to check in with how they themselves are feeling. Without realizing it, they disconnect from their own needs.
When anxiety builds, most of us cope by escaping. We look for quick relief in familiar habits – watching pornography, drinking, keeping conversations light instead of real, or throwing ourselves into work, sports, or doomscrolling. It’s rare for men to have both the space and the tools to actually sit with what they feel.
Men are often solutions-focused, which can be helpful in many areas of life. But anxiety isn’t something you can rationalize your way out of. Anxiety is emotional. It surfaces when we’re running from guilt, shame, sadness, or other feelings that are uncomfortable to sit with. Naturally, we try to escape or fix them. But we can’t change what we don’t take the time to understand. Trying to force ourselves into a positive state can be like putting a bandage over a bullet wound.
Leaning into Anxiety
Have you ever been hit in the stomach and lost your wind? If you have, you know that split second of panic when you’re trying to breathe but your lungs won’t take in air because your diaphragm is locked in spasm. At that moment, our reflex is to gasp for air. But the best solution is counterintuitive – to exhale all the way. By breathing out completely, you help the diaphragm relax, allowing your lungs to open and take in that next full breath.
Exhaling all the way is a powerful metaphor for working with anxiety. When anxiety hits like a punch in the gut, our instinct is to fight it, to tense up and try to force things back to normal. But like being winded, the harder we try to “just breathe” or push it away, the more trapped we feel.
Leaning into anxiety – letting yourself exhale fully – means slowing down, noticing the discomfort, and allowing space for it instead of resisting it. It’s counterintuitive, uncomfortable, and even scary to do, but it’s how we can reset the body and mind. When we stop fighting anxiety and begin to meet it with awareness, we create the space to breathe again.
It’s always challenging to lean into anxiety and look into the shadows with curiosity. But the only way around it is through.
How We Treat Anxiety at Wild North
The process is different for everyone, depending on where you’re at in your healing journey. But we often start with strategies you can use right away, such as mindfulness practices, breath work, and grounding exercises that can calm your nervous system and bring awareness back to the present. These tools build resilience and create space for you to respond, rather than react, when anxiety arises.You’ll learn how to recognize what’s happening in your body and find ways to ground yourself in the moment.
Beyond symptom management, we’ll also explore the deeper roots of your anxiety. Often, anxiety is tied to old experiences, core beliefs, or emotional burdens you’ve been carrying without realizing it. Whatever the cause, we’ll learn how to sit with it, interact with it, and approach it with curiosity rather than fear.
However, the aim is always to meet you where you’re at, and provide gentle guidance towards the places you want to go. You will never be forced into exploring something that you are not ready to move into.
Discover more about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and how it shapes the Wild North approach.
Explore how Narrative Therapy guides the Wild North approach to helping you author a more authentic story.
Uncover how Somatic Therapy at Wild North helps you access the body’s wisdom to heal and integrate trauma.
Together, we’ll work on connecting you to the part of yourself that is calm, confident, courageous, and able to see the world with greater clarity. This is the part of you that knows how to hold space for your anxious feelings. It is the part of you that inherently knows how to heal your suffering and live in the present.
Inclusive Practice
My practice is LGBTQ+ affirming, sex-positive, and welcoming of women, non-traditional relationships, and gender-diverse identities. I’m also a friend and ally to the BIPOC community, and I have experience working with clients from diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. I strive to create a therapy space where you can explore your culture and experiences without fear of judgment or minimization. If you were born in the Milky Way, you are welcome here.