So you’re anxious. And then you notice you’re anxious. And then you start wondering whether you’re more anxious than other people, whether this is normal, whether you should be worried about how anxious you are. Which makes you more anxious. Which you then notice.

Welcome to the loop. If you’re in it, you don’t need me to explain it. 

It doesn’t mean something extra is wrong

The worrying thing about worrying about your worry is that it can start to feel like evidence – evidence that you’re uniquely broken, that your anxiety is especially serious, that there is something about your particular brain that is unfixable. None of that is true. But anxiety is an excellent liar, and it will absolutely weaponise your self-awareness against you if it can.

Noticing that you’re anxious is actually the precondition for doing anything about it. The problem isn’t the noticing. The problem is what happens next – the alarm that kicks in, the frantic attempts to think your way out of it, the exhausting effort of trying not to feel what you’re feeling.

Pushing against it tends to make it worse

This is the bit that tends to feel deeply counterintuitive. The harder you try to stop being anxious, the more anxious you often get. The brain interprets the effort itself as a signal that something is wrong. So you push, it escalates, you push harder.

What can loosen the grip – slowly, and not in a magic-wand way – is developing a slightly different relationship with the anxiety when it shows up. Not surrender, not indifference, but a kind of wary coexistence. Something like: yes, I can feel you, and I’m going to do this thing anyway.

That’s much harder to do alone than with some support. And it’s what a lot of counselling for anxiety actually looks like in practice – working out how to be in the room with your own nervous system without immediately going to war with it.

The loop can be unwound. It takes a while, and it isn’t linear. But it does shift.
If you’d like to talk about what that might look like, I’m here. Contact me