Everyone thinks you are calm. You can hear your own heartbeat.
The alarm is not broken. It has never been told the emergency is over.
High-Functioning Anxiety Therapy for Women in Calgary
Free 15-minute consults are usually booked within 24 hours. Not a waitlist, not a callback queue. You pick a time and it is yours.
Yours looks like a colour-coded calendar. Arriving early to everything. Triple-checking the email, then rereading it at 11 p.m. anyway. From the outside you are the reliable one, the prepared one, the person who never drops a ball. Inside, your mind treats every ordinary Tuesday like a final exam. You replay conversations from 2019. You rehearse conversations that haven't happened. You are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't touch, because the part of you that scans for problems never clocks out. Nobody at work would believe you're anxious. That's sort of the problem.
Is high-functioning anxiety a diagnosis? No. It is an everyday way of describing anxiety that hides behind competence, not a diagnosis you will find in a medical manual. What people mean by it often overlaps with generalized anxiety, perfectionism, panic, burnout or ADHD. Counsellors do not diagnose, but in your consult we can talk about what fits, and whether a formal assessment with a physician or psychologist would help.
You are not imagining it. In Statistics Canada's 2022 Mental Health and Access to Care Survey, 5.2% of Canadians met the criteria for generalized anxiety disorder in the past year, double the 2.6% recorded in the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey on mental health. In every age group the survey reported, women had higher rates than men.
What it can cost you. A jaw that is always clenched. Headaches, a tight chest or a stomach that never settles. Lying awake rehearsing tomorrow. Saying yes when you mean no. Procrastinating in a way that looks like preparation. Snapping at the people closest to you because you have nothing left after being calm for everyone else.
What we work on. Noticing the alarm earlier, before it runs the day. Practising good enough on purpose, in small and safe doses. Loosening the rules that say rest has to be earned. Building ways to settle your body as well as your thoughts. We set goals together and review them openly.
When to check in with your doctor. Some physical conditions, including thyroid changes and perimenopause, can feel a lot like anxiety. If your symptoms are new, getting stronger, or include panic attacks or chest pain, it is worth seeing your family doctor as well.
We get underneath the symptom instead of just managing it. Using IFS and attachment-informed approaches, we get to know the part of you that stays vigilant, and what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. We work with the catastrophizing and with the perfection math, where 99 good outcomes are luck and one mistake is proof.
​
We also practise tolerating calm. For many women, ease itself is dysregulating, unfamiliar, undeserved. Learning to let good moments simply be good is a skill, and it is one we practise deliberately. We review progress openly, and when the work is done, we say so.
Why This Happens
The alarm is not broken. It has never been told the emergency is over.
Somewhere along the way, being three steps ahead started working. Vigilance kept you safe. Being prepared meant nobody could criticize you. Anticipating the problem meant the problem never arrived. It worked, which is exactly why it never stopped.
That is also why "just relax" has never once helped. You cannot reason a smoke detector out of going off. Your alarm system is not defective. It is doing precisely what it learned to do, on a schedule nobody ever cancelled.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER
Common Questions
Will therapy make me less driven? No. The goal is not to remove your engine. It is to stop running it on dread.
​
You will see Nancy Jassi, MACP, CCC, a Canadian Certified Counsellor who is accepting new clients and also offers sessions in Hindi and Punjabi. In person in Calgary's Kensington neighbourhood and online across Alberta. Individual sessions are $190 for 50 minutes. Direct billing may be available with many insurers. Every fit starts with a free 15-minute consult.
You don't have to keep carrying it alone. Book a free 15-minute consultation to find your fit, and take the first step.