What Your Anxiety Might Be Protecting

Most people who come into therapy presenting with anxiety want it gone and that's understandable… Anxiety is relentlessly exhausting; it can hijack a workday, a relationship, the entirety of a final semester. 

The dominant cultural script tells us anxiety is a malfunction to be eliminated, and there's no shortage of strategies, apps, breathing exercises, and medications recommended to do exactly that. None of those are bad and many of them DO help. I’ve also become aware of how many strategies aimed at making anxiety go away seem to deepen the very feeling of being at war with oneself; the unending, internalized battle that brought a person to therapy in the first place.

In the pursuit of peace of mind (and body), I've come to lean toward a different stance built on curiosity and acceptance, not as a replacement for the practical tools, but as something to stand alongside them:

What if your anxiety is protecting something?

Not pathologizing it. Not dismissing it. Not sentimentalizing it either. Simply allowing for the possibility that the part of you generating those uncomfortable signals is doing so on behalf of something that matters to you, and that the signals might sometimes be worth listening to before they get silenced.

The part of us that watches

Because anxiety, at its root, is a vigilance system; by design, it runs ahead in time and tries to predict what could go wrong so we can prepare accordingly. In its more extreme forms, it can become consuming and clinically significant, and in those cases, it absolutely warrants treatment, sometimes including medication. Nothing in this piece is meant to suggest that someone in serious distress should simply sit with it and call it sacred. Suffering is not the goal and mitigating it with medication is a valuable and endorsed intervention for many.

But for many of us, the everyday, inevitable anxiety we live with… the Sunday scaries before a big Monday meeting, the spiraling worry about a friendship that's feeling different, the tight chest and lumpy throat before a hard conversation; these signals are not malfunctions. It's a part of us trying to keep watch over something we care about.

Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger describes how animals in the wild discharge survival energy after a threat passes. They shake. They run a few extra steps, regain their breath. They return to baseline. Humans, with our complicated brains and suffocating social rules, often don't get that opportunity to release. That protective energy stays inside us, looking for a place to go. Some of what we call anxiety, in this view, isn't a defect at all; it's a mechanism within the body that has not yet been given permission to complete what it started.

Once we begin to suspect that something protective might be inside the anxiety, the question shifts from the usual question of “How do I get rid of this?” to a question I’ve found more useful by wondering “What is this anxiety afraid would happen if it stopped?”

I have watched people in session sit with this question and begin to discover that the part of them generating anxiety is not their enemy. It's the part of them that loves their partner and is afraid of losing them. It's the part that values doing good work and is afraid of being misrepresented as incompetent. It's the part that has been hurt before and is determined not to be hurt that way again. It's the part that holds onto a dream and is terrified of its own hope.

When we can name what anxiety is protecting, we can transform it. The anxiety itself often softens, not because we have defeated it, but because it has been heard and we suddenly have access to the actual thing underneath, which is almost always something we care about deeply. Something we might, in a different language, call sacred.

That word matters here, and by sacred I don't mean religious. I mean the things in your life that, if lost, would radically change who you are. The relationships, the values, the futures you're still hoping for. Anxiety often points right at them.

Listening as a stance

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, writes about reciprocity with the natural world as something built on listening rather than extraction. We listen to a forest, a river, a plant, not to dominate it but to understand what it is telling us about itself. I have come to think of working with anxiety in a similar way. The first move is not to fix or extract or eliminate. The first move is to listen.

In practice, that can be as simple as pausing the next time anxiety surfaces and asking (before you reach for a coping skill) “what is this part of me trying to do for me right now?” You may not get a clear answer the first time. That's fine, as the question itself begins to shift the relationship.

Steppingstones into this stance…

• The next time anxiety rises, see if you can notice it without immediately trying to make it go away. Just notice. Where in your body is it? Are there words it wants to say?

• Then ask: What is this part afraid would happen if it stopped doing its job?

• Perhaps ask: What does this part of me love? What is it trying to protect? How can I trust myself to be my own protector?

• Notice if there is something underneath the anxiety that you have not yet allowed yourself to feel. Often anxiety is a sentinel standing guard over grief, longing, or hope.

• Seek out Hoʻoponopono; an ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation, forgiveness, and making things right, both within oneself and in relationships. Singing this to your anxious parts sounds strange the first time. Try it anyway. The part of you that has been working overtime to keep you safe has rarely been seen, validated, thanked, and loved in the way it deserves. 

None of this replaces good clinical care. If your anxiety is overwhelming your life, please reach out to a therapist or your prescriber. The practices above are not a substitute for treatment; they are a way of being with the part of yourself that worries, alongside whatever other support you need.

This offering is an invitation to shift from “get rid of this” to “what is this trying to tell me”, and that shift, in my experience, is where the actual work begins. Anxiety, at its root, almost never points at something arbitrary. It points at what we love, what we fear losing, what we have not yet found a way to hold. When we can finally hear what it has been trying to say, we don't always need to argue with it anymore.

We just need to listen.