If you’ve been managing anxiety for a while, you’ve probably tried explaining it to someone who hasn’t felt it. You describe it and they suggest a walk or some breathing exercises. What actually shifts things is working with a therapist who understands what anxiety actually is and how it operates, not just the coping tips.
Living Well started offering anxiety counselling in Calgary in 2008. Three in-person counselling locations now, plus online therapy throughout Alberta for people whose daily life and schedule makes in-person difficult. The team is Registered Psychologists, Social Workers, and Canadian Certified Counsellors, most of them with years focused specifically on anxiety.
What is Anxiety, Really?
Roughly speaking: anxiety is your body’s threat detection system. It fires when something looks dangerous, which is the point. The problem is it can’t tell a real threat from a difficult email, a crowded room, or just Tuesday with nothing obviously wrong. For a lot of clients with anxiety disorders, it fires constantly. Or for things that happened years ago. Or it fires and there’s no clear trigger at all, which is maybe the hardest version to live with.
When the alarm fires constantly, or way out of proportion to what’s actually happening, the effects show up across your whole life. Your mental health takes a hit. Your physical health follows. Sleep gets disrupted. Worry that should be occasional becomes background noise. Many describe it as carrying something heavy all the time without being able to set it down, and that’s a fair description of what chronic anxiety actually feels like.
What clients describe to our Calgary counselling team tends to cluster around a few things. Persistent dread sitting on top of ordinary daily life situations. Panic attacks involving racing heartbeat and shortness of breath, or a rising sense that something is about to go wrong. Physical symptoms that don’t obviously connect, muscle tension, headaches, disrupted sleep that doesn’t improve. Avoidance, where daily life quietly reorganizes around the things that trigger anxiety symptoms. Trouble concentrating or staying present. Sometimes several of these mental health symptoms at once.
Symptoms:
• Persistent dread
• Panic attacks
• Muscle tension
• Headaches
• Sleep disruption
• Trouble concentrating
What Conditions Does Our Calgary Anxiety Therapy Cover?
Anxiety covers more ground than most people realise. It’s not one thing. Our Calgary anxiety therapy team, which includes several Registered Psychologists with specialized experience, works regularly with clients across the full range of anxiety presentations.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder, the chronic excessive worry kind, is one. Social Anxiety Disorder is another, the fear of judgment that limits social situations and relationships over time. Panic Disorder involves the attacks themselves plus the anticipatory fear between them. OCD brings intrusive thoughts and the compulsive behaviours that form around them. PTSD, which roots anxiety in past trauma, often shows up long after the original event. Health Anxiety is persistent fear about illness and physical health. And Specific Phobias tie intense fear to particular objects or situations in ways that tend to reorganize daily life around avoidance.
You don’t need a formal diagnosis to come in. If anxiety symptoms are getting in the way of your daily life, relationships, or mental health, that’s enough reason. Our Calgary anxiety counselling team offers counselling and therapy services across all of these presentations. Your anxiety counsellor will help you figure out the right direction and find the right support.
ANXIETY THERAPY CALGARY
The Approaches We Use
There are several Calgary anxiety therapy approaches with real evidence behind them, and our Registered Psychologists, Provisional Psychologists, and Canadian Certified Counsellors use all of them to varying degrees. What your therapist ends up recommending depends on your symptoms, your history, what you’ve already tried, and what they think will actually land for you. Most clients end up with a combination. Here’s what’s available:
CBT has more research behind it for anxiety therapy than almost anything else. The underlying idea is that anxious thinking and avoidance behaviour keep each other in place. CBT works on both sides: noticing the thought, checking whether it holds up, and reducing the avoidance that feeds it. For most clients the skills start showing up in daily life fairly quickly.
EMDR is a separate approach worth knowing about if your anxiety connects to past trauma. It uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain process memories still generating a stress response today. Heather Nolin, MC, brings extensive experience as a Senior Registered Psychologist and EMDRIA-certified therapist on our team. A few other psychologists have EMDR training too.
DBT is worth mentioning for clients whose anxiety comes packaged with intense emotional states. It’s practical and skills-based, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness, and the tools tend to be immediately usable in real situations, not just in a therapy room. A lot of clients appreciate that.
Mindfulness-based approaches work from a different starting point. Rather than directly challenging anxious thoughts, the aim is to change your relationship to them, to be able to observe them without being run by them. Some clients find this more useful than anything else, particularly those who’ve found CBT-style thought-challenging a bit too effortful. When it fits, the daily life and mental health benefits hold. It also tends to support the work done in other parts of counselling.
Your anxiety counsellor will be upfront about what they recommend, what it can realistically support, and why. The counselling plan is built around your situation, not a template.
Starting Anxiety Counselling at Living Well
Step 1 — Free Consultation
A free 20-minute consultation to discuss your needs and answer any questions.
Step 2 — First Session
Your therapist listens and learns about your history, concerns, and goals.
Step 3 — Ongoing Sessions
Sessions run for 60 minutes and are usually scheduled weekly or bi-weekly.
Step 4 — Progress
Many clients begin noticing real improvement around session 6, though it varies for everyone.
OUR
THERAPIST
Every therapist at Living Well holds a Master’s degree minimum and is registered to practice in Alberta. Psychologists, Provisional Psychologists, Registered Social Workers, Canadian Certified Counsellors. A fair number have additional credentials or years of direct clinical experience in specific areas. Ongoing professional development is expected; it’s part of how we keep the counselling services and therapy work current and relevant to real daily life.
Some of the Calgary therapists you might work with:
| Therapist | Credentials | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Heather Nolin | Senior Registered Psychologist | Weekdays, Evenings |
| Shannon Baustad | Senior Registered Psychologist | Weekday daytime |
| Jacqueline Van Starkenburg | Registered Psychologist | Weekdays |
| Katherine Jarrell | Senior Social Worker | Weekdays |
| Emily Zhang | Canadian Certified Counsellor | Afternoons |
| Samira Zabian | Provisional Psychologist | Weekdays |
Calgary counselling services run across all three locations, and online throughout Alberta. The team works in multiple languages, and we see clients from a wide range of backgrounds, First Nations communities included. Therapist fit matters more in therapy than most people expect. Good ongoing support depends on it. If the first counsellor isn’t right, say something and we’ll find you one who is.
Who Comes to Anxiety Counselling in Calgary?
Genuinely, all kinds of people. Not just those whose anxiety has become unmanageable. A lot of clients are getting by fine on paper. The anxiety symptoms are quietly draining energy and limiting mental health and quality of life. But it doesn’t look that way from the outside.
The situations that bring someone to our Calgary anxiety counselling services are pretty varied. Some are dealing with anxiety that never really settles, the kind that affects sleep and daily functioning constantly. Some are managing panic disorder or panic attacks more frequently, or tied to a specific situation, a job change, a relationship difficulty, a period of sustained mental health pressure. Anxiety and depression showing up together is common too, and the combination of anxiety symptoms and depressive symptoms can be particularly draining. Social anxiety that quietly limits connection and confidence, affecting daily life in a gradual way, is another pattern. Sometimes it’s physical health symptoms, tension, a racing heart, persistent sleep problems, that doctors have ruled out as medical but that clearly connect to mental health. And sometimes it’s a long stretch of difficult life experience that’s built up to the point where professional support feels necessary.
Adults, children, couples, families, we see all of them. Three Calgary locations in-person, online counselling across Alberta and Canada. The level of mental health care, support, and counselling services quality is the same regardless of which format works for you.
Depression Counselling Calgary: When It’s Both
The two conditions overlap more than most people expect, and they tend to travel together. If you’re looking for depression counselling Calgary therapists who understand that, you’re in the right place. When both are present at once, daily life can feel stuck in a specific way. Too wired to rest, too flat to move.
Our depression counselling in Calgary runs alongside anxiety counselling, not as a separate queue. There’s a lot of shared ground in the therapy approaches: the thought patterns that feed low mood, daily structure, skills for managing difficult emotional states, building better support systems. Treating both at once tends to produce faster mental health progress. Gains in one area carry over into the other, and daily life tends to improve more quickly than people expect from working on either one alone.
Online Therapy and In-Person Anxiety Counselling Calgary
In-person: Kensington, Inglewood, Douglasdale. Online therapy available to clients throughout Alberta.
Worth saying a bit more about online: the anxiety counselling Calgary clients access virtually follows the same standard as in-person anxiety therapy. For 60-minute sessions, same credentials, same quality of mental health support. The work itself, understanding your anxiety symptoms, building practical tools, tracking symptoms and progress with your therapist, runs the same way. Some people genuinely prefer the commute of walking to their own couch. Others want in-person. Both are legitimate and both work.
Rates, Insurance, and Getting Started
Rates at Living Well are below the Calgary average for psychology and counselling, and they vary depending on the therapist’s level. A lot of clients have extended health benefits that cover some or all of the cost. Worth checking your plan. The view here is that mental health support should be accessible to people across all walks of life in Calgary.
The initial consultation is free and there’s no obligation. If Living Well isn’t the right fit, no problem.
Find an Anxiety Therapist in Calgary
If you’re ready to find an anxiety therapist in Calgary, Living Well is here to help. Our team has supported clients across Alberta since 2008. Professional support can help reduce anxiety symptoms and improve daily life.