Anxiety Therapy in Boulder

Anxiety rarely looks like anxiety from the outside. It looks like being the prepared one, the responsible one, the person who thinks three steps ahead. It looks like a full calendar and a mind that does not turn off at night. By the time most people call me, they have already tried the obvious things. They have read about it, exercised, cut back on coffee, meditated with an app. Some of that helped a little. None of it touched the engine.

Here is what I have come to think after years of this work. Anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a very good alarm system that has lost its sense of proportion, usually for reasons that made sense at the time. The job is not to rip out the alarm. It is to help it recalibrate, and to help you stop treating every alarm as a fire.

How the work goes

I lean on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which was developed for depression and translates directly to anxiety. The mindfulness piece trains attention so that you can notice a worry spiral starting instead of discovering it an hour later, already exhausted. The cognitive piece takes apart the beliefs the spiral runs on, the catastrophes that feel like forecasts, the standards that would be cruel if applied to anyone else. Neither works alone. Together they change what anxiety can do to your day.

Alongside that, we get curious about what the anxiety is protecting. That is the Gestalt and depth part of my training showing up. Very often chronic worry grew up as a strategy, a way to stay safe in a family, a job, or a relationship where letting your guard down was not an option. Honoring that history, rather than pathologizing it, is usually where the real loosening begins.

Panic, social anxiety, and the high-functioning kind

Panic attacks respond well to understanding what your body is actually doing and practicing a different response to the first signals, so the wave crests lower and sooner. Social anxiety tends to be about a harsh inner audience more than any real one, and we work directly with that audience. And the high-functioning kind, the anxiety that produces excellent work and a private sense of running on fumes, is everywhere in Boulder. It is also very workable, once we stop treating the striving as the solution.

Who this is for

Professionals and graduate students who cannot downshift. Parents who lie awake running scenarios. People whose anxiety shows up mostly in their relationship, which is why some of this work happens in couples therapy. Adults with ADHD, where anxiety often developed as a coping strategy for a mind that kept dropping things. People in recovery who notice the anxiety was there before the drinking. And plenty of people who would not use the word anxiety at all, just stress, or being wound tight, or not being able to enjoy anything.

A note on medication

I am a licensed professional counselor, not a prescriber. Some of my clients use medication alongside therapy and many do not. If it is part of your picture, that happens with a physician or psychiatrist, and I am glad to coordinate. Either way, you will not get a diagnosis and a worksheet from me. Feeling less afraid is a fine reason to start. Getting your life back from the vigilance is the better one.

Boulder, and anywhere in Colorado

I see clients in person at my office on Spruce Street in downtown Boulder, and by secure video across the state. Sessions run 50 to 60 minutes on an income-based sliding scale, and the first conversation is a free 30 minutes to see whether we are a fit. You can read more about working together online, or about how Gestalt and depth psychology shape the way I work.

Common questions

Written by Dylan Leigh, MA, LPC, a licensed professional counselor in Boulder, Colorado. Updated September 2026.