High-Functioning Anxiety Treatment in Long Beach, CA
Transform Daily Struggles Into Manageable Success Stories
Proudly Serving Families Throughout Los Angeles County
You're successful by every external measure, with a thriving career, impressive achievements, and respect from colleagues; yet, internally, you're battling constant worry, perfectionism, and the exhausting need to have everything under control.
High-functioning anxiety affects many driven professionals in Long Beach, creating a hidden struggle that others rarely see or understand.
At Olive Leaf Therapy, we specialize in helping high-achieving individuals like you manage anxiety without compromising your success.
Our attachment-based, trauma-informed approach recognizes that your anxiety often stems from deeply ingrained patterns that once served you but now create unnecessary suffering.
Located conveniently on Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach, we understand the unique pressures facing professionals in this dynamic coastal community. Our therapists work collaboratively with you to develop healthy coping strategies, reduce perfectionism, and restore inner peace while maintaining your professional excellence and personal standards.
High-functioning anxiety presents differently than traditional anxiety disorders.
You may appear calm and capable to others while internally experiencing racing thoughts, chronic worry, perfectionism, difficulty saying no, and physical symptoms like tension or insomnia.
Many successful professionals struggle with this condition, often feeling like they're the only ones experiencing this internal turmoil despite outward success.
Our individual therapy approach begins with understanding your unique anxiety patterns and their origins. We utilize attachment-based therapy to explore how early relationships may have contributed to your need for control and perfection. Through trauma-informed techniques, we address underlying experiences that may fuel your anxiety, helping you understand why your nervous system responds the way it does to stress and pressure.
The therapeutic process involves developing practical skills for managing anxious thoughts, setting healthy boundaries, and practicing self-compassion. We work together to identify your core values and align your actions with what truly matters to you, rather than external expectations or perfectionist standards. Our collaborative approach ensures you remain in control of your healing journey.
Recovery from high-functioning anxiety doesn't mean lowering your standards or becoming less successful. Instead, it involves learning to achieve your goals from a place of inner calm rather than anxiety-driven compulsion. You'll develop sustainable habits that support both your professional success and emotional well-being, creating lasting change that enhances all areas of your life.
Manage High-Functioning Anxiety in Long Beach
Your family's healing journey starts with one conversation.
Key Benefits
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Perfectionism often drives high functioning anxiety, creating an exhausting cycle where nothing feels good enough. In Long Beach's competitive professional environment, many individuals feel pressured to maintain impossibly high standards across all areas of life.
This perfectionist mindset, while sometimes beneficial for achievement, can become a prison that generates constant anxiety and prevents you from enjoying your accomplishments. Our therapy helps you distinguish between healthy striving and destructive perfectionism. We work together to identify areas where perfectionist tendencies serve you and where they create unnecessary stress.
Through evidence-based techniques, you'll learn to set realistic standards, accept "good enough" in appropriate situations, and celebrate your achievements without immediately moving to the next goal. This process allows you to maintain your high standards where it matters most while reducing the anxiety that comes from applying perfectionist expectations to every aspect of your life.
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High functioning anxiety often involves difficulty setting boundaries, leading to overcommitment, burnout, and resentment. Many Long Beach professionals struggle with saying no to additional responsibilities, social commitments, or workplace demands, fearing they'll disappoint others or miss opportunities.
This pattern creates chronic overwhelm and reinforces anxiety as you try to manage an unsustainable workload. Our therapy focuses on helping you understand your boundary patterns and developing the skills to communicate limits effectively. You'll learn to distinguish between opportunities worth pursuing and those that drain your energy without adding meaningful value to your life.
We practice assertiveness techniques that allow you to decline requests respectfully while maintaining professional relationships. Through this work, you'll discover that setting boundaries actually enhances your effectiveness and relationships, as others learn to respect your time and you can fully commit to what you choose to pursue.
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Chronic stress from high functioning anxiety takes a toll on your physical health, relationships, and long-term career sustainability. Many driven professionals in Long Beach push through stress symptoms, viewing them as necessary costs of success rather than warning signs that need attention.
This approach often leads to burnout, health issues, and decreased performance over time. Our therapy teaches you evidence-based stress management techniques specifically tailored for high achievers. You'll learn to recognize early stress signals and implement effective coping strategies before reaching overwhelm.
We explore mindfulness practices, breathing techniques, and cognitive strategies that you can use during busy workdays. Additionally, we help you develop sustainable self-care routines that fit your lifestyle and values. The goal isn't to eliminate all stress but to develop a healthier relationship with it, using stress as information rather than allowing it to control your decisions and well-being.
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High functioning anxiety frequently manifests in physical symptoms, particularly sleep disturbances that impact your energy, mood, and cognitive performance. Many Long Beach professionals experience racing thoughts at bedtime, difficulty falling asleep despite exhaustion, or waking up feeling unrefreshed.
These sleep issues create a vicious cycle where fatigue increases anxiety, which further disrupts sleep. Our therapy addresses both the mental and physical aspects of anxiety, helping you develop better sleep hygiene and bedtime routines. We work on calming techniques specifically designed for the transition from busy days to restful nights.
You'll learn to manage the worry thoughts that often intrude during quiet moments and develop practices that signal to your nervous system that it's safe to rest. Additionally, we explore how lifestyle factors like caffeine, exercise timing, and screen exposure may be impacting your sleep, creating a comprehensive approach to improving your physical well-being.
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High functioning anxiety can strain relationships as you may become irritable, withdrawn, or overly controlling when stress levels rise. Partners, family members, and friends in Long Beach often struggle to understand why someone who appears so successful and capable can become anxious or demanding in personal relationships.
The perfectionist tendencies and control needs that drive professional success can create conflict in intimate relationships where vulnerability and flexibility are essential. Our attachment-based therapy approach helps you understand how your anxiety affects your relationship patterns.
You'll learn to communicate your needs and concerns more effectively, reducing the tendency to either suppress feelings or express them in ways that push others away. We work on developing emotional regulation skills that allow you to stay present and responsive in relationships, even when experiencing internal anxiety. This work often leads to deeper, more satisfying connections as you learn to show up authentically while managing your anxiety in healthy ways.
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Many high achievers rely on anxiety and adrenaline to fuel their productivity, creating an unsustainable cycle that leads to burnout and decreased performance over time. In Long Beach's fast-paced professional environment, this pattern is common but ultimately counterproductive.
Our therapy helps you identify which of your current success strategies are truly serving you and which are driven by anxiety rather than intentional choice. Together, we develop new approaches to motivation, goal-setting, and productivity that don't rely on stress and pressure. You'll learn to tap into intrinsic motivation, align your efforts with your core values, and create sustainable work habits that support both achievement and well-being.
This process involves examining your relationship with success itself, helping you define achievement in ways that feel authentic and fulfilling rather than driven by external expectations or fear of failure. The result is a more balanced approach to success that you can maintain throughout your career without sacrificing your health or relationships.
Our Service Categories
Individual Anxiety Therapy
Our individual therapy sessions provide personalized treatment for high functioning anxiety, focusing on your unique patterns and triggers. We use attachment-based and trauma-informed approaches to address underlying causes rather than just surface symptoms. Sessions are conducted in a safe, confidential environment where you can explore your relationship with achievement, perfectionism, and control without judgment. Treatment plans are developed collaboratively, ensuring they fit your lifestyle and goals while addressing the specific ways anxiety manifests in your life.
Perfectionism Recovery Support
Targeted therapy for individuals whose perfectionist tendencies have become a source of anxiety and limitation rather than motivation. We work together to identify healthy striving versus destructive perfectionism, developing new approaches to goal-setting and achievement that maintain your high standards while reducing anxiety. This process involves exploring the origins of perfectionist patterns and creating more balanced, self-compassionate ways of pursuing excellence.
Stress Management Counseling
Specialized counseling designed for professionals experiencing chronic stress and overwhelm. We focus on developing practical coping strategies that you can implement during busy workdays, along with longer-term lifestyle changes that support sustainable success. This service addresses the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of stress, helping you build resilience and maintain peak performance without sacrificing your well-being or burning out from excessive pressure.
Relationship and Communication Therapy
Support for individuals whose anxiety impacts their personal and professional relationships. We focus on developing better communication skills, emotional regulation techniques, and boundary-setting abilities that enhance your connections with others. This service addresses how anxiety can strain relationships and provides tools for maintaining healthy connections while managing your internal experience of worry and stress.
Our Process
1. Initial Assessment & Goal Setting
Your therapeutic journey begins with a comprehensive assessment where we explore your anxiety patterns, triggers, and how they impact your daily life and relationships. We discuss your goals for therapy, current coping strategies, and what you hope to change or maintain in your life. This session typically lasts 90 minutes and includes discussing your history, current stressors, and developing initial treatment goals. We also establish a collaborative relationship where your input guides the therapeutic process, ensuring treatment aligns with your values and lifestyle needs.
2. Developing Awareness & Understanding
In early sessions, we work together to increase your awareness of anxiety patterns, identifying specific triggers and your typical responses to stress. Using attachment-based approaches, we explore how your early relationships and experiences may have contributed to your current anxiety patterns. This phase involves learning to recognize the difference between helpful concern and anxiety-driven worry, understanding your nervous system responses, and beginning to develop a more compassionate relationship with yourself and your anxiety.
3. Building Coping Strategies & Skills
As understanding develops, we focus on building practical skills for managing anxiety in real-time. This includes learning breathing techniques, mindfulness practices, cognitive strategies for managing worried thoughts, and behavioral approaches for reducing avoidance or control behaviors. We practice these techniques in session and develop plans for implementing them in your daily life, with regular check-ins to refine and adjust strategies based on what works best for you.
4. Integration & Sustainable Change
The final phase focuses on integrating new skills and perspectives into your daily life for lasting change. We work on maintaining progress during stressful periods, developing relapse prevention strategies, and creating sustainable self-care practices. Sessions may become less frequent as you demonstrate mastery of new coping skills and report improved well-being. We also discuss strategies for continued growth and when to consider returning to therapy for additional support.
Our Approach
Our approach to treating high functioning anxiety is rooted in attachment-based therapy, recognizing that many anxiety patterns develop from early relationship experiences and attachment styles.
We understand that your anxiety often served important functions in your development, helping you achieve success and meet expectations, but it may now be creating more problems than solutions in your adult life. Rather than simply trying to eliminate anxiety, we work to understand its origins and transform your relationship with it.
We utilize trauma-informed care principles, acknowledging that anxiety often stems from past experiences that taught your nervous system to be hypervigilant or to seek control as a way of feeling safe. This approach is particularly relevant for high-functioning individuals who may have learned to manage anxiety through achievement and perfectionism. Our trauma-informed perspective helps us understand why traditional relaxation techniques may not work for you and why your anxiety might actually intensify when you try to "just relax."
The therapeutic process is highly collaborative, recognizing that you are the expert on your own experience and goals. We work together to develop treatment plans that fit your lifestyle, values, and specific concerns. This collaborative approach is especially important for high-functioning individuals who are accustomed to being in control and may feel uncomfortable in traditional therapy relationships where they feel like passive recipients of treatment.
Our Long Beach location allows us to understand the unique pressures and opportunities present in this vibrant coastal community. We recognize the specific challenges faced by professionals in this area, from competitive work environments to the pressure to maintain work-life balance in such a desirable location. This local understanding informs our treatment approach, helping us provide relevant, practical strategies that work within the context of your Long Beach lifestyle and career demands.
FAQs
Olive Leaf Therapy has been serving the Long Beach community with attachment-based, family-centered, and trauma-informed therapy services since expanding to this location. Our experienced therapists specialize in helping individuals, couples, and families restore peace through healthy connections, with particular expertise in anxiety and stress management for professionals.
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High functioning anxiety isn't an official diagnosis but describes individuals who experience significant internal anxiety while maintaining successful external lives. Unlike traditional anxiety disorders that may impair functioning, people with high functioning anxiety often appear very capable and accomplished to others. They may excel at work, maintain relationships, and handle responsibilities while internally struggling with perfectionism, chronic worry, and physical anxiety symptoms. This type of anxiety is often overlooked because the person seems to be doing well, making it important to work with therapists who understand this specific presentation.
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This is a common concern among high achievers who worry that their anxiety is what drives their success. However, research shows that anxiety-driven motivation is ultimately unsustainable and often leads to burnout, health problems, and decreased performance over time. In therapy, we work together to help you discover intrinsic motivation and develop sustainable approaches to achievement that don't rely on stress and worry. Many clients find they become even more effective and satisfied with their work when they're motivated by genuine interest and values rather than anxiety and fear.
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Treatment length varies depending on individual factors, but most clients begin experiencing relief within the first few sessions as they develop initial coping strategies. Significant improvement in anxiety management typically occurs within 3-6 months of consistent weekly therapy. Long-term changes in perfectionism patterns and attachment-based issues may take 6-12 months or longer. We regularly assess progress together and adjust treatment length based on your goals, preferences, and the changes you're experiencing in your daily life.
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Absolutely. The goal isn't to lower your standards but to help you distinguish between healthy striving and anxiety-driven perfectionism. We work together to identify areas where your high standards serve you well and areas where they create unnecessary stress. You'll learn to maintain excellence in areas that matter most to you while developing more flexibility in less critical areas. Many clients find they actually perform better when they're not constantly anxious, as they can think more clearly and make better decisions.
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Yes, we understand that many Long Beach professionals have demanding schedules that make traditional business hours challenging. Our practice offers flexible scheduling options including early morning, evening, and some weekend appointments to accommodate your work schedule. We also provide telehealth options for sessions when you can't make it to our Pacific Coast Highway location, ensuring that your therapy can fit into your lifestyle and commitments.