Stress & Anxiety

The particular pressure of the Brussels institutions

Working in and around the European institutions is a specific kind of pressure. The dossiers, the negotiating cycles, the late plenary weeks, the travel between capitals, the multilingual demands, the sense that a mistake is visible and consequential — all of it accumulates. Add to that the fact that many people are far from home, relocated into a highly social but paradoxically isolating environment, sometimes on precarious contracts, sometimes at the top of their careers, and the result is a population running at a level of sustained stress that has come to feel normal.

It is not normal, and it is not without cost. Chronic stress does not stay as stress. Over time it becomes anxiety — the tight chest before the inbox, the poor sleep, the irritability, the sense of never being off — and for many people it eventually reaches for something to take the edge off.

When stress becomes anxiety, and then something you drink

The Brussels professional culture makes this easy to miss. There is a drink at the end of every session, a reception most evenings, wine over every working dinner. There are anxiolytics prescribed to “manage the stress,” stimulants to keep going, online gambling and trading a tap away. None of it looks like a problem, because the environment does not name it as one — and careers continue to flourish while, privately, the relationship with the substance has quietly changed.

This is the point at which stress, anxiety and addiction stop being separate subjects. Treating the drinking without addressing the stress that drives it rarely holds; addressing the stress without acknowledging what has become of the drinking misses what is keeping the person stuck. The work here holds both together.

A private, highly specialised service

In Belgium much mental-health support is arranged through the public system, and for many that is the right route. This is deliberately something else: a private, highly specialised practice — consultant-level, no waiting list, free choice of clinician, and complete confidentiality. For people in institutional, diplomatic and public-facing roles, that discretion is not a formality; it is the condition that makes the work possible at all.

The approach

The work is integrative and depth-oriented. It begins not with willpower but with function: what the stress response is protecting, what the anxiety is signalling, what the drink or the pill or the screen is doing for you, and what it would take for that to no longer be necessary. Where the pressure sits on older, unprocessed experience, EMDR may be incorporated — Dr Jacquet is an EMDR practitioner of more than 20 years. You can read more on the related addiction counselling and depression and anxiety pages.

If any of this is familiar, an initial consultation is confidential and without obligation. Arrange a consultation and we can think it through — quietly, and with complete discretion.