Guided Practice
Breakthrough Digital Anxiety
Anxiety has become a common feature of contemporary adult life, reflecting sustained cognitive load, attentional fragmentation, and environments organised around performance and constant responsiveness.
Support that takes context seriously.
Persistent anxiety and mental fatigue are increasingly shaped by environments of infinite choice, constant notification, and algorithmic pressure. These are not personal failures, but predictable responses to systems that monetise attention and compress inner life.
I work with the psychological consequences of the systems we now live inside. Trained in psychology (PhD, MPhil, MSc Cantab), my background spans academia, strategy consulting, technology product work, and clinical practice — which means I’ve helped build environments that promise efficiency and then sat with the anxiety, exhaustion, and confusion they produce. This work grows out of that tension: not asking how individuals should cope better, but how systems quietly train us to feel this way.
What's Included
- 9 step-by-step video and audio trainings (a total of 5 hours of instruction)
- 5 demonstrations of techniques to reduce anxiety for you to immediately practise.
- Downloadable timetable and reflective journal
- Scripts and templates for exactly what to do when you’re struggling
- Reminders and instructions for you to download and follow
Module 1
The Brain in an Always-On World
You may be tempted to skip the science and get straight to relief. But understanding why anxiety takes hold changes how you relate to it. Anxiety is shaped by the interaction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex — systems evolved to detect threat and make sense of it. In digitally saturated environments, these systems are constantly stimulated by alerts, comparisons, and ambiguous signals. By understanding how this affects interpretation and stress responses, we can begin to reduce unnecessary alarm and support the brain in returning to a steadier, more regulated state.
Module 2
Reframing Attention and Interpretation
Anxiety today is not just an internal loop of faulty thinking. It is shaped by environments designed to capture attention, accelerate interpretation, and keep the nervous system on alert. Brains evolved for scarcity and embodied cues are now exposed to constant signals — notifications, metrics, comparisons — without resolution. Over time, this trains anxiety as a default mode of attention. Reframing anxiety means slowing interpretation, restoring context, and reclaiming attention from systems that profit from keeping it unsettled.
Module 3
When Thoughts Are Engineered
Anxious thoughts do not arise in a vacuum. They are shaped by environments that reward speed, certainty, and reaction. Digital systems train attention toward alerts, metrics, and comparison, encouraging rapid interpretation without context. Over time, the mind learns to treat ambiguity as threat and urgency as truth. This section examines how thoughts are engineered by design, not personality, and how slowing attention restores judgement, allowing signals to be evaluated rather than reflexively believed or automatically acted.
Module 4
Why Anxiety Isn’t a Thinking Problem
If anxiety could be solved by thinking differently, it would have disappeared long ago. Most people already know their worries are exaggerated, unhelpful, or irrational — and yet the pattern persists. That’s because anxiety is not primarily a failure of insight or willpower. It is a trained response. In digital environments designed to reward vigilance, comparison, and rapid interpretation, anxiety acquires value. It keeps attention engaged. It feels protective. Over time, the nervous system learns that staying alert is safer than letting go. Change, then, doesn’t come from arguing with anxious thoughts. It comes from interrupting the conditions that keep rewarding them — and retraining attention so that anxiety no longer feels necessary. What we’re working with here is not mindset, but habit, environment, and the quiet economics of attention.
Module 5
Reclaiming Attention
Mindfulness is often sold as a way to calm down or cope better. That undersells what it actually does. At its core, mindfulness retrains attention — and attention is the primary resource digital systems compete for. Anxious minds are not distracted; they are hyper-trained to scan, interpret, and anticipate. Mindfulness interrupts this by slowing perception and widening the frame of awareness. Instead of reacting automatically to every signal, the mind learns to notice without immediately responding. Practised consistently, this restores a capacity modern environments erode: the ability to stay with experience without being pulled into urgency or judgement. This isn’t about relaxation. It’s about regaining agency over attention in systems designed to keep it unsettled.
Module 6
Interrupting Self-Surveillance
Much of contemporary anxiety is sustained not by danger, but by constant self-monitoring. Digital environments train us to track performance, mood, productivity, and social response in real time — turning attention inward as scrutiny rather than awareness. This section focuses on interrupting that loop. Instead of watching yourself to improve or correct, you learn how to release continuous self-evaluation and restore forms of attention that are steadier, less punitive, and less reactive. The aim is not self-control, but relief from being endlessly observed — especially by yourself.
Module 7
Re-regulating the Nervous System
Periods of sustained screen-based life place the nervous system under chronic strain. Research suggests this is not simply psychological, but physiological. In a controlled study, Broota and Sanhvi (1994) found clinically significant reductions in student anxiety during examination periods following regular practice of a structured set of yogic postures. The mechanism was not relaxation alone, but nervous-system regulation. The practices here are simple, time-bound, and designed for adult lives shaped by digital alertness — using breath and movement to interrupt constant vigilance and restore physiological balance.
Module 8
Creativity as Cognitive Reorientation
Anxiety is sustained by constant interpretation: monitoring, judging, anticipating. Creative making interrupts this process directly. Evidence from neuroscience shows that activities such as drawing and working with form shift attention out of evaluative loops and into sensory focus. Attention becomes absorbed rather than vigilant; thinking slows without effort. In this module, creativity is used to interrupt self-surveillance, not to express emotion or produce insight. No artistic skill is required. The aim is simply to make — and to experience what changes when attention is no longer organised around performance, comparison, or control.
Addendum:
Counter-Habits
This closing session is about making the work liveable. Not adding more practices, but letting the right ones settle — so they endure rather than impress. Drawing on research in positive psychology, including the work of Scott Glassman, we look at how habits actually take hold in real lives shaped by fatigue, distraction, and limited time. The focus is on rhythm, friction, and fit: how to integrate these practices without turning them into another performance. What lasts is rarely dramatic. Small, well-placed structures outlive ambitious routines. We end by shaping a rhythm that can survive ordinary life — and still hold when pressure returns.
Insight matters, but sustaining change usually requires structure and support. If you’d like to explore one-to-one work, you’re welcome to book a conversation.
The Algorithmic Mind
Counter-Practices
Contemporary life is organised around optimisation — productivity, performance, self-management — a logic that now shapes inner life, attention, and relationships. These counter-practices offer a brief step outside that rhythm, slowing attention and reconnecting us with shared presence, curiosity, and embodied meaning-making.
About you…
You may be functioning well on paper yet feel inwardly crowded — not broken, but overstimulated. You may be looking for moments, not solutions: brief encounters with awe, thought, or conversation beyond metrics and performance. Moments that restore space, curiosity, and a sense of being more than a unit of output.
About these counter-practices…
These counter-practices are research-informed experiences designed to resist optimisation and extraction. The aim is not self-improvement, but reorientation — restoring attentional depth, sensory richness, and shared inquiry. Through time-bounded, facilitated sessions informed by psychology and neuroscience, participants engage with art, music, and complex material in ways that slow perception, ease vigilance, and support deeper attention, emotional regulation, and collective meaning-making.
Keeping it authentic, fearless and compassionate
Get involved by working with me directly. Alongside receiving one-to-one support, you’ll be contributing to the development of NeuroClear — an emerging, evidence-based clinical platform focused on assessment and support for neurodivergent adults.
