The #1 Thing I Tell My Clients About Anxiety

Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash

If there’s one thing I say more than anything else to clients struggling with anxiety, it’s this: anxiety isn’t the problem — the real problem is the interaction you have with the anxiety.

We often treat anxiety like a fire alarm or a check engine light that must be silenced immediately. But anxiety, at its core, is a protective function. It’s your nervous system’s way of saying, “Hey! something matters here, pay attention!”. The challenge we have with anxiety is that our brains aren’t great at distinguishing a real threat from an imagined threat, and so we end up feeling flooded by fear in situations that aren’t actually dangerous. Put another way, our brain can’t really make a threat distinction between a tiger stalking us through the jungle and the thought 'those people are talking about me behind my back'. It is all the same threat to the brain. Threat is threat is threat.

Anxiety, at its core, is a protective function. It’s your nervous system’s way of saying, “Hey! something matters here.”

Instead of trying to eliminate anxiety altogether, I attempt to work with clients to build a different relationship with it—one of curiosity, compassion, and containment. When you shift from “I need this to stop” to “I wonder what this feeling is trying to tell me right now?” you regain agency. You learn to listen without spiralling.

This doesn’t mean you have to enjoy the feeling of anxiety. But you can stop being afraid of being afraid. Of worrying about worrying. The anticipatory anxiety, that comes from a concern that says ‘I don’t know how I will handle it if I get anxious'. Building confidence in your management and interaction with anxiety can be tremendously helpful in reducing overall distress.

If anxiety is a frequent visitor in your life, the most powerful step isn’t fighting it—it’s learning how to confidently interaction with it and learn to work with it. Therapy can offer a safe, structured place to do just that.