Anxiety and Panic Therapy
Anxiety and panic therapy at Murad Counseling helps adults understand and change the patterns that keep anxiety in control: avoidance, reassurance, safety behaviors, body scanning, rumination, and fear of the next wave of panic. If you find it hard to tell useful thinking from worry, our free field guide Worry or Work? offers a practical way to notice the difference, and you can view more anxiety field guides. The goal is not to make you never feel anxious. The goal is to help you respond with more choice when anxiety shows up.
If anxiety has started deciding where you go, what you say, what you avoid, how much you check, and how much you trust your own body, therapy needs to do more than calm you for a few minutes. It needs to target the loop that keeps shrinking your life.
Who This Page Is For
This page is for adults whose anxiety or panic has become more than occasional stress. You may still be functioning on the outside while your day is quietly organized around prevention, checking, avoidance, or trying to feel certain before you move forward.
You avoid situations because you are afraid of panic, embarrassment, losing control, or feeling trapped.
You repeatedly scan your body, research symptoms, seek reassurance, or replay conversations.
You overprepare, overexplain, cancel plans, or rely on safety behaviors to get through the day.
You want therapy that is structured, direct, and focused on the pattern keeping anxiety alive.
Common Anxiety and Panic Patterns
Anxiety can show up as chronic worry, panic attacks, health anxiety, social anxiety, performance anxiety, overthinking, perfectionism, avoidance, or fear of body sensations. Panic can become especially disruptive when the fear of another attack starts shaping where you go and what you do.
The content can vary. The pattern is often similar: a trigger, an alarm response, a safety move, short-term relief, and then more pressure to repeat the same move later.
How Anxiety and Panic Get Maintained
Anxiety is persuasive because it sounds protective. It tells you to avoid, check, ask, scan, rehearse, or leave to feel safer. Those moves may work in the moment, but they also teach the alarm system that the situation, sensation, or thought was dangerous enough to escape.
That is why anxiety can spread. A panic attack in one place can turn into avoiding similar places. One health scare can turn into repeated body checking. One awkward conversation can turn into days of replaying what you said.
How Therapy Helps
Therapy begins by clearly mapping the loop. We examine what triggers anxiety, what your mind predicts, how your body responds, which safety behaviors you use, and the cost those behaviors incur over time. From there, treatment focuses on building tolerance, flexibility, and action in the areas anxiety has narrowed.
This may include exposure practice, reducing reassurance and avoidance, working differently with body sensations, and reconnecting with values that anxiety has pushed aside. Support matters, but it alone is usually not enough when anxiety is organized around avoidance.
ACT and CBT-Informed Approach
My anxiety work is informed by ACT and CBT when those approaches fit the clinical picture. ACT helps you respond more flexibly to thoughts, feelings, urges, and uncertainty. CBT helps identify the patterns of interpretation, avoidance, and behavior that maintain anxiety.
For more in-depth explanations of the methods, see ACT Therapy and CBT Therapy. This page stays focused on anxiety and panic as the presenting concern.
What Sessions May Focus On
Identifying avoidance, reassurance, scanning, checking, and other safety behaviors.
Understanding panic sensations without treating every sensation as an emergency.
Building exposure or practice steps that are clinically appropriate and not reckless.
Reducing rumination, overpreparation, and repeated attempts to get certainty.
Rebuilding ordinary life choices that anxiety has been deciding for you.
How We Know Therapy Is Working
Your experience is always the most important measure of progress. Standardized assessments simply help both of us stay accountable by showing whether symptoms are moving in the direction we expect.
For anxiety, that typically means brief standardized check-ins with the GAD-7, and when panic is central, the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS), alongside the markers that matter most to you: places re-entered, safety behaviors retired, decisions made without rehearsal.
Neither replaces the other. Numbers never replace clinical judgment, and clinical judgment never ignores measurable change. Treatment decisions are never based on a score alone. Progress is measured by combining your lived experience, clinical judgment, and validated outcome measures. More on how this works: How We Know Therapy Is Working.
Frequently Asked Questions
Telehealth and Service Area
Murad Counseling PLLC provides telehealth therapy for adults located in Texas, Washington, and New Hampshire, where Felix Murad is licensed, and in Florida through out-of-state telehealth provider registration.
If you are comparing options, the Services page gives a broader overview of the practice. Fees and private-pay details are outlined on the Pricing page, and the Contact page explains the consultation process.