Anxiety: a radical compass

We tend to think of anxiety as something to overcome. A problem to solve, a quagmire to climb out of. And when it shows up, it's dreadful. Your chest tightens, your stomach drops, your mind starts spinning. Of course you want out.

So we escape. Usually into our heads. We try to think our way past the feeling because staying with it feels unbearable and we feel helpless against it. But escaping into thought doesn't make the anxiety go away. It just goes unattended. And what goes unattended tends to grow.

In therapy, we work differently. Instead of fighting anxiety or trying to think past it, we move toward it. We align with it.

Anxiety is deeply physical. It's often a sign that your body is wound up, stuck in fight or flight, holding an emotion that hasn't been felt yet. So when anxiety shows up in session, we don't go straight for the problem underneath it. We slow down first. We do breath work. We practice noticing what's happening in the body without trying to figure it out or fix it. We let the mind and body meet in the same moment.

This is different from just gritting your teeth and pushing through, and it's different from getting swept up in the feeling either. Real desensitization to anxiety doesn't come from immersing yourself in it, drowning in a fishbowl of it, and it doesn't come from distancing your awareness from it either, going numb, going to your head, checking out. It comes from building a relationship with it. Almost like an attachment. You stay close enough to know it, to recognize its patterns and its signals, without over identifying with it or fighting it. You're with it, not lost in it and not running from it.

Something shifts when this happens. The anxiety starts to settle. People often describe feeling more spacious, like there's suddenly room to breathe. And from that spacious place, it becomes possible to look at what's underneath the anxiety. The event. The deeper emotion that was driving it all along.

Anxiety doesn't usually come from nowhere. A lot of us learned early in life that our feelings weren't fully welcome. Maybe a caregiver couldn't tolerate our sadness, or our anger made them pull away. So we cut ourselves off from those feelings to stay connected and safe. That cutoff doesn't disappear. It shows up later as tension, as an inner critic that keeps watch and keeps us small, as anxiety that seems to come from nowhere but is really an old, learned reflex.

This is why I think of anxiety as a trailhead, not a dead end. It's not just something to manage or push through. It's a path. Follow it with curiosity instead of fear, and it leads somewhere real: back to the feelings you had to leave behind, and the chance to finally give them room.