Written by
Lartey Wellness Group | Serving Baltimore, Laurel, Frederick, and communities across Maryland
If you've been feeling on edge lately, your mind racing at 2 a.m., your chest tight in meetings, your patience thinner than usual — you're not alone, and you're not broken. Anxiety has quietly become one of the most common reasons people walk through our doors. The good news? It's also one of the most treatable.
This post is a starting point. We'll cover what anxiety actually is, a more useful way to think about it, what real treatment looks like, and a simple tool you can use the next time anxiety shows up uninvited.
What Anxiety Actually Is
Anxiety is your body's threat-response system doing its job — just a little too well, and often at the wrong moments.
When your brain detects something it interprets as a threat, it floods your system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate climbs, your breathing speeds up, your muscles tense, your thoughts narrow. This is the same response that helped our ancestors survive genuine danger. It's not a malfunction. It's a feature.
The problem is that modern life is full of things your nervous system reads as threats but can't actually fight or flee from: a tense email, a looming deadline, a difficult conversation, financial pressure, uncertainty about the future. So the alarm system stays on. And on. And on.
It's also worth naming what so many people are carrying right now. Heading into 2026, nearly 6 in 10 Americans report feeling anxious about personal finances, with concerns about the year ahead and current events close behind. If you've been losing sleep over the cost of groceries, a layoff, a job market that feels harder than it should, or simply not knowing what's coming next — that's not you being dramatic. That's a real stressor your nervous system is responding to, and you're far from alone in feeling it.
Over time, that constant activation wears you down. You might notice:
Difficulty sleeping or staying asleep
A persistent sense of dread, even when nothing specific is wrong
Trouble concentrating or making decisions
Irritability, restlessness, or feeling "wired but tired"
Physical symptoms — headaches, stomach issues, muscle tension, a racing heart
Avoiding situations, people, or tasks that feel overwhelming
If any of that sounds familiar, your nervous system isn't betraying you. It's asking for support.
A More Useful Way to Think About Anxiety
Here's a reframe that changes things for a lot of our clients: anxiety isn't the enemy. It's information.
We tend to treat anxiety like something to eliminate — a problem to solve, a feeling to suppress, a weakness to overcome. But anxiety is trying to tell you something. Sometimes it's pointing at a real issue that needs your attention: a boundary that's being crossed, a decision you've been avoiding, a relationship that isn't working, a workload that genuinely isn't sustainable. Sometimes it's a learned response from earlier experiences that's showing up in situations that don't actually call for it.
Either way, the goal of working with anxiety isn't to make it disappear forever. It's to build a different relationship with it — one where you can listen to what it's telling you without being controlled by it.
A few small shifts that help:
From "What's wrong with me?" to "What is this trying to tell me?" Curiosity loosens anxiety's grip in a way self-criticism never will.
From "I need to make this stop" to "I can handle this while it's here." The fear of anxiety often becomes bigger than the anxiety itself.
From "I should be able to handle this alone" to "Getting support is a skill, not a weakness." People who reach out for help recover faster. That's not opinion — it's what the research consistently shows.
What Treatment Actually Looks Like
A lot of people put off therapy because they're not sure what to expect, or they imagine it as just talking about their childhood for years on end. Modern anxiety treatment is much more practical and goal-oriented than that. Here's what we offer at Lartey Wellness Group, and how each option works:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the most well-researched approach for anxiety. It focuses on the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — and gives you concrete tools to interrupt the patterns that keep anxiety going. CBT is structured, skills-based, and typically shorter-term than people expect. Many clients notice meaningful change within 8 to 12 sessions.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is another evidence-based option, especially when anxiety has roots in past experiences — trauma, painful relationships, moments that left a mark your nervous system still remembers. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (guided eye movements or tapping) to help your brain reprocess those memories so they stop hijacking your present. It's worth noting that "trauma" doesn't have to mean something catastrophic — smaller, less obvious experiences can also be stored as trauma by your brain and continue to fuel anxiety years later. EMDR is offered by select clinicians on our team.
Medication management is a real option for some people, and we want to demystify it. Medication isn't a personality change, a permanent commitment, or a sign that something is seriously wrong with you. For many people, it's a bridge — something that turns the volume down on the symptoms enough that the rest of the work becomes possible. Our psychiatric providers work closely with our therapists to make sure your care is coordinated.
Group therapy offers something individual work can't: the experience of not being alone in this. There's a particular kind of healing that happens when you realize the things you've been carrying privately are things other people are carrying too.
Most clients use some combination of these. A common starting point is weekly individual therapy, with the option to add medication or group support as it makes sense.
A Tool You Can Use Today: Box Breathing
Before you finish reading, let's give you something practical.
Box breathing is a technique used by Navy SEALs, emergency responders, and elite athletes — people who have to stay calm and clear-headed under extreme pressure. It works because slow, controlled breathing directly signals your nervous system that you're safe. Your heart rate slows. Your stress response eases. Your thinking clears.
Here's how it works:
Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds
Hold your breath for 4 seconds
Breathe out through your mouth for 4 seconds
Hold empty for 4 seconds
Repeat for 4 cycles, or until you feel your system settle
That's it. Four seconds in, four hold, four out, four hold. It's called "box" breathing because the four equal phases form the four sides of a square.
You can do this anywhere — at your desk, in your car before walking into something hard, in bed when you can't sleep, in the bathroom at a stressful event. No one has to know you're doing it.
We've built a guided animation on our website that walks you through it visually. If you find this helpful, bookmark the page and come back whenever you need a reset.
[Try our guided box breathing tool →]
When to Reach Out
If anxiety is interfering with your sleep, your work, your relationships, or your sense of who you are — that's enough of a reason to talk to someone. You don't need to wait until things get worse. You don't need to have "real" trauma to qualify. You don't need to have tried everything else first.
Our team in Maryland specializes in anxiety, stress, trauma, and the everyday weight that builds up when life gets heavy. We offer in-person and virtual sessions, accept most major insurance plans, and have availability for new clients.