Understanding the Nature of Anxiety
Feeling anxious is something we all experience. Whether it's worrying about an upcoming presentation, wondering if we'll make a good impression, or simply fretting about everyday tasks, anxiety touches every aspect of our lives. But here's the crucial insight that many people miss: the problem isn't anxiety itself—it's feeling anxious about being anxious.
Many individuals who struggle with anxiety spend years trying to eliminate it completely. They avoid situations that trigger uncomfortable feelings, employ distraction techniques, and do everything possible to escape the sensation that something terrible might happen. However, this approach often backfires spectacularly.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders affect millions of people worldwide. Yet understanding the difference between experiencing anxiety and suffering from it can transform your entire perspective.
Why You Can't Simply Eliminate Anxiety
Here's a fundamental truth that might surprise you: you don't overcome anxiety by attempting to eliminate it. In fact, you cannot completely remove anxiety from your life—nor would you want to.
Consider what a world without anxiety would actually look like. Without this emotion, we wouldn't recognize when something deserves our attention. We wouldn't have careers because we wouldn't have seen the point in studying or gaining qualifications. We wouldn't have relationships because we wouldn't have bothered making a good impression on first dates.
There are only two categories of beings who don't experience anxiety: those who have passed away (they have other concerns) and individuals with certain psychological conditions who lack the capacity to consider consequences. Neither group represents a desirable state of being.
Why We View Anxiety So Negatively
The obvious reason we despise feeling anxious is that it feels absolutely terrible. When we experience elevated levels of anxiety over extended periods, it can quickly dominate our existence and even define who we are. Naturally, we want to escape it.
When our personal attempts to manage anxiety fail, most people seek help from medical professionals. While doctors are incredibly valuable—they save lives daily—they face significant limitations when addressing anxiety:
- Time Constraints: A typical appointment lasts only 8-11 minutes, which is insufficient to properly diagnose and address anxiety issues.
- Training Limitations: Physicians are taught that anxiety constitutes a mental health condition, yet they aren't mental health specialists. Becoming a psychiatrist requires an additional five to six years of training.
- Resource Scarcity: Doctors have limited resources for treating anxiety. Counseling waiting lists can extend 12-16 weeks, leaving patients in desperate need of immediate help.
This often leaves medication as the primary option. However, relying on pharmaceuticals comes with unpredictable side effects, and even finding a drug that works can create new anxieties about dependency. As the Anxiety UK organization notes, a medical solution to a non-medical problem merely patches the issue temporarily.
The Dangerous Misconception: Anxiety as an Illness
One of the most damaging outcomes of seeking medical help for anxiety is receiving a label. You might leave the doctor's office diagnosed with an "anxiety disorder," which becomes yet another source of worry.
Through countless conversations with anxiety sufferers, a common pattern emerges. When asked what concerns them most, the answer typically isn't a specific situation—it's how anxious they feel and whether it will ever stop. This meta-anxiety is largely fueled by the belief that anxiety represents an illness.
Here's the liberating truth: anxiety is not an illness—it's an emotion. Every emotion serves a purpose and constitutes a natural, vital component of human experience. In this regard, anxiety is no more threatening than happiness, sadness, or anger. Without anxiety, we'd be missing an essential piece of our emotional toolkit—that would genuinely be a disorder.
The Ship Analogy: Understanding Your Mind
To better comprehend our emotional responses, imagine your mind as a vessel. Every ship has a captain and a crew. The captain represents your logical, rational, conscious thinking—the part that knows your destination and how to reach it.
However, the crew—your subconscious mind—actually controls the steering and sails. Your subconscious manages all automatic responses: thought patterns, behavioral tendencies, belief systems, and crucially, your emotions.
Your crew navigates the ship by triggering appropriate emotional responses:
- When something appears dangerous, fear makes us uncomfortable, encouraging us to retreat to safety.
- When we feel wronged, anger energizes us to take corrective action.
- When something matters too much to ignore, anxiety demands our attention.
Fundamentally, your crew operates on a simple principle: finding the optimal strategy for maximum happiness. Safety matters because we cannot feel happy without feeling secure. But ultimately, your subconscious constantly tries to steer you toward contentment.
As American author John Shedd wisely observed, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." Learn more about managing emotional responses at the American Psychological Association.
Why Your Crew Sometimes Gets It Wrong
Even when your crew makes you feel terrible—telling you that you're not good enough, that you'll never succeed, that you're unlovable—these harsh messages aim to protect you from potentially unhappy experiences. They're not attempting to sink the ship; they're trying to navigate away from storms they fear you cannot weather.
However, every decision your crew makes relies on lessons learned throughout your lifetime. Since many of these lessons came during early childhood, some no longer apply, and others were simply incorrect from the start. Consequently, your crew frequently makes mistakes regarding anxiety.
But making mistakes doesn't make them adversaries. Yet this hostile view appears constantly—people wanting to "throw those crew members overboard." When we perceive part of our mind as actively trying to destroy us, viewing it as an enemy becomes natural. Believing our mind has turned against us leads to concluding we're broken, making it easy to accept the notion that our feelings indicate illness.
Three Essential Steps to Transform Your Relationship with Anxiety
1. Refuse to Believe You're Ill
Among everything that might trigger anxiety, decide not to feel anxious about feeling anxious. Recognize that anxiety never strikes randomly—it's always sparked by a situation or thought process. This understanding opens the door to genuine progress.
2. Listen to Your Crew
Many people spend years pushing their anxious feelings away, trying to ignore the messages. But when you ignore someone with important information, they speak louder. Continue ignoring them, and they begin shouting.
The only way to stop anxiety from screaming is to actually listen. Hear what it's communicating. Seek to understand what your crew hopes to achieve through these feelings. Transform your perceived enemies into trusted allies.
Remarkably, when you start genuinely listening to your mind's messages, the shouting subsides. When the crew stops yelling, the captain finally gets heard. That's when your logical thinking regains influence. You can then evaluate whether feelings are appropriate or inappropriate, helpful or unhelpful.
3. Always Be Kind to Yourself
Perhaps most importantly, always treat yourself with kindness. If you're like most people, you've spent considerable time criticizing yourself for mistakes, imperfections, or simply for the way you feel. Despite criticism received from others throughout life, you've probably been your own harshest critic.
This accumulated negativity devastates morale aboard your ship. Demoralized crew equals low self-esteem, and low self-esteem means even minor challenges generate anxiety. The good news? You can repair this damage simply by choosing to always communicate with yourself kindly and positively.
People perform their best work when feeling empowered. Your crew operates identically. Simply put: beating yourself up leaves you defeated; building yourself up reveals limitless potential.
Embracing Anxiety as Part of Daily Life
Understanding why experiencing some anxiety daily might actually be beneficial can transform your perspective. It signals that your crew continues sailing the ship, still striving to move in the right direction.
Anxiety is the part of you that prompts rereading important emails before sending. It ensures you verify your keys are in your pocket before leaving home. It makes your heart flutter slightly when contemplating an important presentation.
Consider this everyday example: feeling slightly anxious on garbage collection morning serves as a gentle reminder to take out the bins. It's not debilitating—barely a whisper—just loud enough to register. Once the task is complete, the feeling vanishes.
While this seems trivial, such minor anxieties can become problematic if we believe our feelings indicate abnormality. Would receiving an anxiety disorder diagnosis make you dread certain mornings? Would you feel anxious about potential flare-ups? Would you curse yourself for not being completely free of anxiety?
Finding the Truth Between Two Extremes
Two popular positions on severe anxiety exist, and both miss the mark:
- The Illness Position: It's a mental illness, it's how you're wired, and little can be done.
- The Dismissive Position: It's not real, it's all in your head, just get over it.
Neither perspective helps, and both are incorrect. The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Of course anxiety is real—nobody asks to feel this way, yet we do. However, experiencing these feelings now doesn't mean change is impossible.
The first step toward transformation is acceptance. Once we accept anxiety as a natural component of human experience and treat it not as an enemy but as a trusted friend, the crew simply returns to sailing the ship. We start feeling significantly less anxious about anxiety itself.
For additional resources on managing anxiety effectively, visit Mind UK or explore techniques at HelpGuide.
Conclusion: A New Perspective on Feeling Anxious
So how are you feeling today? If you're feeling anxious about something, that's actually good news. It means you're alive. It indicates a part of you trying to communicate something it considers important.
Take time to listen. Your anxiety is attempting to help, not harm. By shifting your perspective from viewing anxiety as an enemy to recognizing it as a natural guide, you can fundamentally transform your experience. The key isn't eliminating anxiety—it's changing your relationship with it.
Remember: experiencing anxiety while continuing to function and thrive represents the goal. You don't need to be anxiety-free to live a fulfilling life. You simply need to stop feeling anxious about feeling anxious.