This is the most common question I hear, and it usually arrives with an apology attached: other people have it worse. Let me answer it directly.

There is no admission threshold. Therapy is not an emergency room that must be reserved for the visibly injured. Some people come because they cannot get out of bed; others because life works, on paper, and yet something in it has gone quiet. Both are legitimate. The second is not a lesser version of the first — it is often the beginning of the first, caught early.

A more useful question than is it serious enough is: does it keep returning? A mood, a conflict, a heaviness that comes back despite your reasonable efforts to think or organise it away is a pattern, and patterns respond well to being examined with another person.

And if it turns out, after a conversation or two, that what you need is not therapy but rest, or a decision, or simply to have said something out loud once — that is a good outcome too. You will not have wasted anyone's time, least of all mine.