“I don't know why I feel this way.”
So many of the people who come to see me describe an anxiety they can't explain. They feel a bit on edge, almost all the time, as if their body never fully switches off. Their thoughts loop: replaying conversations that already happened, rehearsing scenarios that may never happen. Sleep becomes difficult. They notice they're not really present anymore, and that time with friends doesn't bring the joy it used to. Sometimes there's a racing heart, or a tightness in the chest that seems to come out of nowhere.
For some, this anxiety has been there for as long as they can remember. For others, it appeared later, after a move, a loss, a new job, or a season of life that simply asked too much.
Either way, it's rarely “for no reason.” There is almost always a reason. It just isn't always one we can see right away.
When anxiety has always been there
When someone tells me they've felt anxious since they were very young, we often discover, gently and over time, that there was stress in the early circumstances of their life. Sometimes the stress happened to them directly. Sometimes it was carried by the people taking care of them, and the child absorbed it without anyone saying a word.
Often, too, their emotional needs weren't fully met. Feelings weren't always taken seriously. Emotional regulation was dismissed, or simply never taught, because no one had taught it to their parents either.
So the child did what children do: they found the best coping strategies they possibly could. For many, that meant bottling feelings up. For others, it meant feelings bursting out all at once. What was usually missing was the chance to truly process those feelings and sensations, and to understand the biology of their own stress.
The anxiety they feel as adults isn't a personal failing. It's a nervous system that learned, very early, to stay on alert.
When anxiety starts later in life, after a move or a loss
For others, anxiety arrives in adulthood, sometimes quite suddenly. Moving to a new country is one of the most common triggers I see. Everything familiar falls away at once: your language, your routines, your people, the small certainties that kept you steady without you even noticing.
Often, though, it isn't one big event. It's a combination of events that each seemed manageable on their own. A demanding job. A new relationship. The loss of someone you loved. Taken separately, each one felt okay. Together, they add up to more than your system can hold.
And sometimes, simply living in a city with a very fast pace and high-energy rhythm, like Dubai, can be enough to tip the balance. Your body adapts to the speed around it, until one day it no longer knows how to slow down.
If this is you, you're not weak and you're not “losing it.” Your nervous system is responding to a load it was never designed to carry alone.
Why you feel anxious for no reason: what's happening inside
Your nervous system has one main job: to keep you safe. When it senses danger, it prepares your body to respond. Your heart speeds up, your muscles tense, your breathing changes, and your mind scans for what might go wrong. That's what the looping thoughts, the tight chest and the restless nights are: your body's alarm system doing its job.
The difficulty is that this alarm doesn't only respond to real, present danger. It responds to what it has learned is dangerous. A system that grew up on alert, or that has been under pressure for a long time, can stay switched on even when nothing is threatening you right now. That's why the anxiety can feel so confusing: your mind says “everything is fine,” while your body insists it isn't.
Why calming yourself down often isn't enough
By the time people come to see me, they have usually tried a lot. Reassuring themselves. Rationalizing. Keeping busy, pushing through, dismissing their feelings. Some have tried breathing exercises or yoga, anything they heard might help.
These efforts make sense, and some of them help a little. But they often fall short, because anxiety and stress really happen in the body. We can't talk ourselves out of anxiety before we've given our body a sense of safety.
That's why my work is a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one: we start with the body, and the mind follows.
How we work with it together
In my anxiety therapy work, in Dubai and online, healing begins with understanding: a lot of psychoeducation about your own unique nervous system, because no two are alike. From there, we go step by step:
- Teaching safety to the body. In sessions, we practice grounding and anchoring tools that slowly teach your nervous system it is safe.
- Bringing it into daily life. You begin using these tools between sessions. You learn what helps and what doesn't, what to do more of and less of, so your life matches the capacity you have right now.
- Reconnecting with your body. Noticing its signals instead of overriding them.
- Working with your thoughts, once the body feels safer. We break down and challenge the thoughts that aren't helping you.
- Exploring deeper beliefs. We work through the unhelpful beliefs you may hold about yourself and the world, often by meeting the parts of you that carry them.
- Healing what keeps you stuck. Where unhealed trauma is fueling the anxiety, we look at it and work through it, with approaches such as EMDR.
Little by little, we update your internal software, so you can live the life you want to live today, and not only the one your old database is still running on.
Approaching your anxiety with curiosity
Whether your anxiety has been with you since childhood or arrived with a recent chapter of your life, the invitation is the same: approach it with curiosity rather than judgment. Try to understand what is happening inside you, and what your body, mind and soul need to find balance again, especially during a time that may feel deeply out of balance.
Your anxiety isn't proof that something is wrong with you. It may be the clearest sign that a part of you is asking to be heard.