I have a story I return to often, one that took me a long time to believe: anxiety is not the enemy. For most of my life — and for most of the clients I've sat with — anxiety arrives like an unwelcome guest, loud and insistent, and the first impulse is to get it out of the house as quickly as possible. Distract it. Medicate it. Outrun it. Argue with it until it gives up and goes quiet.
What I've come to understand, both through my own experience and through sitting with people in their hardest moments, is that anxiety doesn't come to destroy you. It comes because it is trying to tell you something — and it will get louder, more intrusive, more physically insistent, the longer you refuse to hear it. The urgency isn't a malfunction. It's a feature.
The Biology Behind the Message
Your nervous system evolved over millions of years with one primary instruction: keep you alive. The amygdala — sometimes called the brain's alarm system — doesn't distinguish between a predator in the grass and a difficult email from your boss. It scans constantly, pattern-matching against every threat it has ever encountered, and when it finds a match, it mobilizes the whole body to respond.
That mobilization is anxiety. The racing heart, the shallow breath, the tunneling of attention, the sense that something is very wrong even when the room is quiet. These are not signs that you are broken. They are signs that your body is doing exactly what it was built to do — and that somewhere in its ancient architecture, it has decided that something here requires your attention.
"The anxiety itself is not the problem. What matters is whether we fight it, flee from it, or — the harder and more rewarding path — learn to listen."
What Is Your Anxiety Actually About?
Here is where I find the most interesting work lives. Once you shift from how do I make this stop to what is this trying to show me, anxiety becomes a surprisingly precise instrument. I've noticed that mine tends to point toward things I haven't been willing to say out loud, places where I'm overextended and pretending I'm fine, and moments where something in my life is quietly misaligned with something I actually value.
I have a story — one I hold loosely — that anxiety is often loneliness. Not always the loneliness of being alone, but the particular loneliness of not being known. Of carrying something without having anywhere to put it down.
Some places anxiety tends to point:
- Unmet needs. Not the polite, easy-to-ask-for kind. The deeper ones — to be seen, to rest, to be held in your complexity without anyone flinching.
- Unspoken truths. Something you've been circling for months but haven't yet said, to yourself or to someone else.
- Boundary crossings. A situation that conflicts with your values, or a version of yourself you're performing that no longer fits.
- Real, legitimate threat. Sometimes the situation is actually difficult. Anxiety, in those moments, is simply an accurate read.
A Practice: The Anxiety Interview
When anxiety arrives — and it will arrive — I invite you to try something before reaching for the usual exits. Get curious about it instead. You can do this in writing, or in the quiet of your own mind. Treat the anxiety as a visitor who has traveled some distance to reach you. What did it come to say?
- What do you need me to know?
- What are you afraid will happen if I don't listen?
- What would it take for you to ease up a little?
- Is there something I've been avoiding that you're trying to point me toward?
I'll be honest: when I first tried this, I expected nothing. I was surprised to find that when I actually slowed down enough to ask, something specific came. Not always immediately. But it came.
When Anxiety Needs More Than a Reframe
I want to name something important here, because I think it matters: curiosity alone is not always enough. Anxiety disorders — generalized anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, and others — involve nervous systems genuinely stuck in overdrive, in ways that exceed what a reframe or a practice can address. If that's where you are, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means the system needs more support, and there is real help available.
Even so, even in those circumstances, the relational stance toward anxiety changes something. Fighting it tends to amplify it. Meeting it with even a fraction of curiosity — even in the middle of a panic attack — can begin to shift its character.
You don't have to like your anxiety to listen to it. But you might find, once it feels heard, that it quiets down — just a little — on its own.