The brand new Forres Counselling Blog
Wednesday 6 May 2026 • Written by Anna Webster
Hi and welcome to the brand new Forres Counselling blog! If you’ve made it to this page, chances are you know a few details about Forres Counselling, but on the off- chance you’ve been directed straight here, allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Anna Webster and I run a private counselling practice with my husband, Neil. We offer single and couples counselling (in that we each counsel couples, we don’t counsel together in the same room!), both face-to-face from our business in Forres on the north east coast of Scotland, and online.
We are two psychotherapists who are passionate about sharing useful tools for dealing with real life mental health difficulties. So as part of our website, we thought it may be helpful to start a blog where we take turns to offer therapeutic tips that may help with day-to-day life. Of course, nothing beats talking therapies if you’re struggling, but to steal a supermarket tag line, every little helps.
We hear the phrase ‘I wish I’d known this before’ a lot in the therapy room, so we decided to start sharing that information with as wide an audience as possible. Hopefully you’ll find something useful to take away and try in your own life.
When discussing how to get started there was really no question for me about the #1 mental health problem that our clients bring to us… anxiety. Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of advice out there and that can feel overwhelming in itself. Some of the advice we get from friends, family and colleagues can be good, but unfortunately a lot of it not so much, however well-intentioned it is.
So here’s the start of a short series on unhelpful things that people get told about combatting anxiety and what you can try instead.
‘Just relax, you’ve got nothing to worry about’
Anyone struggling with anxiety will have heard this one before and it sucks because it overlooks the fact that YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT! The major difficulty for people whose worries are limiting their lives is that they know, logically, that there’s nothing to worry about… but they’re still worried.
It’s as though their brains are just refusing to play ball. Ignore that advice and try… Being as anxious as you can. Seriously. Give up the fight.
If your worry is currently a 7/10 then try pushing the dial up a bit. This very possibly sounds like the last thing you should be doing but let’s look at it another way. You’ve spent months… possibly years… or even decades… doing battle with the anxiety and how is that working out for you?
So today is the day to lay down your weapons. Instead observe those anxious thoughts racing through you brain and slowly try noticing whether they might fall into any broad categories. Three is usually a good number to start with.
When you’ve got your categories then imagine having three huge skips with the category marked on the side. As the anxiety thoughts show up (and they will, in their droves) then try letting them flow through you and on into the skip.
It’s surprising how much relief you can get just from doing this. We’ll come back to what you can do next in another blog, along with other unhelpful but well-meaning things you here when you’re experiencing anxiety.
Has this been useful? Get in touch at info@forrescounselling.com. We’d love to hear from you.