Anxiety gets a bad rap. Most of us just want to get rid of it, silence it, or bury it so we can finally feel peace. We search for the fix, the technique, the secret tool that will make the feeling disappear. But what if anxiety isn’t actually the enemy? What if it’s not something broken inside of you—but something that’s trying to protect you, in the only way it knows how?
Let’s rewind a bit. Imagine you’re in the woods and a bear appears. Your heart races. Your breath quickens. Your body tenses. You’re not thinking about your to-do list anymore—your entire system is focused on one thing: survival. That’s anxiety doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Why Anxiety Exists
Anxiety is a survival response. Your brain and body are wired to detect danger, prepare for threat, and respond in a way that protects you. That quickened heart rate? The shallow breath? The urge to run or lash out? Those are signs your nervous system is doing its job. In modern life, this ancient system gets triggered by things like unread emails, social pressure, deadlines, or fear of judgment.
We’re not usually running from bears anymore, but our nervous systems don’t always know that. They respond to modern stress as if it were life-or-death. And sometimes that’s warranted. Social rejection and financial instability are two examples of legitimate threats to our emotional and psychological safety in our modern world that warrant anxiety.
When Anxiety Becomes Chronic
The problem isn’t anxiety itself—it’s when the alarm gets stuck in the “on” position. When your brain is constantly scanning for danger and your body never gets the “all clear” signal, you end up in chronic survival mode. This can show up as constant worry, muscle tension, exhaustion, difficulty concentrating, irritability, or the need to always be “doing.” Your body becomes like a smoke alarm that goes off when you’re just making toast.
Retrain Your Brain
Instead of trying to eliminate the alarm completely, the goal is to help our brain differentiate real threat from false alarms. The next time anxiety shows up, try asking:
👉 “Is this a real threat—or does it just feel like one?”
This small pause can help create enough space for your brain to gather more context. And that context is powerful—it allows you to start interpreting your body’s signals with more accuracy instead of defaulting to fear. When we learn to question the alarm instead of obeying it, we begin teaching our nervous system that not every alert means danger. Over time, and with gentle repetition, those false alarms get quieter. Your brain becomes better at detecting safety—and anxiety no longer has to be in charge.
✨Want more strategies to get past those false alarms? Come join me in my upcoming course The Anxiety Loop: Why It Won’t Go Away and How to Break the Cycle. I’ll be sharing so much more to help you understand what’s happening and actually create change.
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Dana Basu, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist at EverGROW therapy and founder of Everything But Crazy, an online resource for highly sensitive people with emotional wounds. She provides individual therapy for adults in California, while her workbooks and online resources are accessible worldwide.