Rethinking Anxiety: A New Way to Meet an Old Response
Feeling anxious is one of the most universal human experiences there is. And while it can be intensely uncomfortable, it is a function of our operating system, not a personal failing. It reflects an ancient system designed to protect us. The trap many of us fall into, however, is deciding that anxiety is too unbearable and that whenever it shows up, we must work to push it away. This pursuit tends to backfire by locking us in a struggle with our inner experience that only amplifies our distress. You may have already noticed that trying to push anxiety away has a way of spoiling the present moment, often without the added benefit of having solved anything for us.
This article invites you to reconsider how you navigate your relationship with anxiety. It will ask you to change your philosophy on what you should do with your thoughts and feelings, particularly the undesired ones. In return for doing this, it will allow you to find comfort in the present moment.
In it, we’ll explore three areas:
How anxiety shows up in the body and the system behind it
Why it developed in the first place
How we might begin to relate to it in a way that leads to less struggle and more freedom
How Anxiety Works in the Body: The Full-Body Response
Anxiety is a full-body reaction rooted in an ancient survival system. When the brain senses a threat, it triggers a cascade of responses designed to prepare us for action. The heart races, pumping blood to the arms and legs. Muscles tense and ready themselves. Blood shifts away from the skin and extremities, which can leave the hands and feet cold or tingly. Breathing turns quick and shallow to deliver oxygen where it is needed most. The stomach churns, the mouth goes dry, the pupils dilate. We begin to sweat. None of this is random. Every piece of it serves the function of helping to keep us alive in the face of danger.
Why Anxiety Exists: A Survival System in Overdrive
In the animated movie The Croods, Nicolas Cage voices an overprotective prehistoric father who humorously illustrates the anxieties related to caring for a family in a dangerous primitive world. His motto? Never not be afraid, of course. And to discourage his family from venturing beyond their cave, he often recounted the cautionary tale of Crispy Bear:
“Tonight, we’ll hear the story of Crispy Bear. A long time ago this little bear was alive. She was alive because she listened to her father and lived her life in routine and darkness and terror. So she was happy. But Crispy had one terrible problem. She was filled with curiosity. Yes, and one day, she saw something new and died!”
This exaggerated example illustrates how our ancestors had to overestimate danger to stay alive. That same evolutionary wiring persists today, even though our threats look very different. Instead of activating at the sight of predators, anxiety in the modern age gets triggered by psychological and social pressures such as dreading a job we feel trapped in, the anticipation of a text from a love interest, or the unease of an upcoming presentation. These situations activate the same ancient survival response. But without an immediate physical danger to attend to, we are often left tangled in thought or wound up in emotion.
Worse still, we’ve invented a new layer of suffering our ancestors never had to contend with. We become anxious about the anxiety itself and work to push it away, bargain with it, and try to figure out how to prevent it from returning. It is exhausting, and it rarely works. Since this primitive system evolved as a life-saving response that we can’t simply switch off, a useful question worth sitting with is what we should do when those feelings rush in.
Changing Our Relationship with Anxiety
If anxiety is hardwired and largely unavoidable, maybe the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate it. Long before modern psychology existed, different traditions were already wrestling with this problem and arriving at conclusions worth revisiting.
Buddhism, which traces its origins to Siddhartha Gautama in ancient India around the 5th century BCE, begins with a straightforward observation: suffering is a consistent feature of human life, and much of it is generated not by circumstances themselves but by the way we relate to them. The Buddha, a title meaning something close to “the one who woke up,” did not claim to have eliminated difficulty. He claimed to have stopped fighting it in ways that made it worse. Central to Buddhist thought is the recognition that clinging to pleasant experiences and pushing away unpleasant ones both produce suffering. Anxiety, in this framework, is not the enemy. Rather, the war we wage against it is.
Stoicism, which emerged in ancient Greece several centuries later, approached the same problem through a different discipline. The Stoics were not interested in suppressing emotion. They were interested in not being ruled by it. One of their core practices was what they called premeditatio malorum, the deliberate and frequent contemplation of difficult or painful outcomes. By imagining loss, failure, or discomfort in advance, they worked to loosen the grip those possibilities held over them. The goal was not pessimism but a kind of prepared equanimity, the ability to meet what comes without being destabilized by it. Anxiety loses some of its power when we stop treating it as something that must never arrive.
Taoism, whose foundational text the Tao Te Ching was written by Laozi around the 6th century BCE, approaches this through the concept of wu wei, often translated as effortless action or non-resistance. The Tao Te Ching uses the image of water moving around obstacles without forcing its way through them, always finding a path forward. It also describes the uncarved block, a state of natural simplicity that exists before striving and effort reshape it into something else. The carved block is what results from all that labor to make something into what it was not. Anxiety, in this light, gains much of its grip from everything we do trying to get rid of it. The resistance is part of what sustains it.
Across these three traditions, separated by geography and centuries, the same recognition keeps surfacing, that when anxiety is treated as a problem to defeat, the struggle with it tends to grow. When it is recognized as a natural part of being human, something else becomes possible.
Try This: A Simple Three-Step Practice
What follows is one approach for working with anxiety rather than against it. It is not a technique for making anxiety disappear. Instead, it is a way of creating enough space for something other than the anxiety itself to become the focus.
The first step is to notice. When anxiety shows up, name and describe what’s happening. Something like: this is anxiety, my body’s threat response doing what it was built to do. That simple act of naming creates some distance between you and the experience, enough to observe it rather than be consumed by it. It is a reminder that you are having a feeling, not becoming one. Said differently, the goal is not to stop the feeling but to stop identifying with it.
The second step is to pause. In most moments when anxiety is present, we are physically safe even if the feeling says otherwise. Take in the world around you. Let your thoughts move without chasing them or trying to resolve them. If unwanted thoughts linger, observe them rather than engaging. The “what if” questions anxiety tends to generate are not problems to be solved in the moment. They can wait.
The third step is to choose. Ask yourself what you would be doing right now if anxiety were not running the show. Maybe it is being present with whoever is in the room with you. Perhaps it is pursuing something that interests you, or simply taking in your surroundings. Whatever it is, move toward it, even if anxiety comes along for the ride.
These steps will not eliminate anxiety and are not meant to. What they can do is recover some of the present moment that anxiety tends to occupy. Over time, the feelings and thoughts may not stick around as long. That is a welcome development, but it is not the point. The point is learning to live a little less inside the noise and a little more in what is actually in front of you.
Anxiety is not a flaw in the system. It is the system doing what it was designed to do, in a world it was not designed for. The question is not how to make it stop. It is how to stop letting it make the decisions.
If this resonates and you're ready to change your relationship with anxiety, I offer in-person psychotherapy in downtown Jersey City and virtually throughout New Jersey. I invite you to get in touch if you'd like to explore working together.
