"You Say My Anxiety Could Be Helpful… Really?"

Discover how listening to your anxiety can turn unsease into insight and personal growth

In this post I look at how listening to your anxiety can ease and reshape it, and make it a force for personal growth rather than just a source of suffering.

Quick Read Summary
Anxiety is more than just worry - it’s a signal from your body and mind that something needs attention. It can appear as a racing heart, tension, restlessness, or difficulty concentrating, and it often reflects unmet needs, unresolved conflicts, or the weight of too many choices. While anxiety can feel disruptive, it also carries valuable information about what matters to us and how we relate to the world.

Listening to your anxiety, rather than trying to suppress it, can reveal insights about your beliefs, boundaries, and the situations that challenge you. Anxiety can even be reframed as excitement or a doorway to openness, curiosity, and personal growth. Through reflection, practical strategies, and therapy, it can shift from a source of stress into a guide - helping you navigate uncertainty, connect more deeply with yourself and others, and approach life with greater vitality.

Anxiety is defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome” (Oxford Languages). It can range from overwhelming panic (see forthcoming post) to a subtler unease that doesn’t stop you functioning but makes it harder to flourish or enjoy life.

It often shows up in the body - a racing heart, tense muscles, shaky hands, sweaty palms, stomach upset, or exhaustion from poor sleep. It affects the mind too, leading to constant worry, restlessness, irritability, or difficulty concentrating. At times it feels mild and manageable; at others, it can be disruptive - limiting fulfilment, straining relationships, reducing productivity, and wearing down overall wellbeing.

A useful tool for gauging severity is the GAD7 Anxiety Test Questionnaire, a straightforward self-assessment often used in healthcare to give a rough indication of anxiety levels.

Anxiety is sometimes distinguished from fear. Fear usually has an object - a spider, an exam, a confrontation - whereas anxiety relates more to the unknown, to uncertainty. It can be vague, pervasive, and hard to pin down.

As Sarah Manguso wrote, Panic came like a wave and the wave never broke, it just sat in me, huge and unrelenting. Or in Anne Carson’s words: Anxiety is not a thing. It is an atmosphere. You walk into it like a room.

Listening to Your Anxiety

Anxiety is not just physiological noise. It often carries meaning - a signal that something needs attention. It can be helpful to see it as the body’s alarm system, alerting us to danger or disconnection. If ignored, it tends to grow louder. The challenge is not only to soothe anxiety, but also to listen to what it might be saying.

Understanding your anxiety can itself bring a significant shift in how you feel. Here are a few suggestions to help you reflect on what may underlie your anxiety, along with some ideas for what might help.

The Weight of Too Much Choice

Kierkegaard described anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.” We are free because our lives are not predetermined, but this freedom comes with responsibility, and responsibility evokes anxiety. Modern life intensifies this through the sheer volume of choices we face.

The philosopher Renata Salecl calls this the “tyranny of choice.” Too many options can paralyse us, make us hypersensitive to the possibility of making the wrong decision, and erode our sense of personal agency.

I used to often wander restlessly around a city looking for 'the' right place to eat, only to return to the first or second place I saw. This is a trivial example, yet it caused me frustration and tiredness. Multiply this pattern across many daily decisions and it doesn’t take long to reach high levels of anxiety and mental exhaustion. It’s also incredibly inefficient.

Salecl suggests a few ways of easing this burden:

• Set Gentle Boundaries: Limit information absorption. You don’t need to check every update or weigh up every option. Stick to one or two trusted sources, make a simple rule for decisions (like choosing the first thing that fits your needs in a good enough way), and feel free to say no to things that don’t add real value.
• Practice Minimalism: Simplifying what you own, creating simple routines, and focusing only on what truly matters can make daily choices feel easier. Minimalism isn’t about missing out - it’s about clearing space for the people, experiences, and passions that really matter to you.

Anxiety is often intensified by perfectionism - the belief that there is a single best option and anything less will not do. Learning to accept “good enough” can lighten this burden and make space for freedom within limits. Perfectionism can also feed into procrastination, which in turn can exascerbate anxiety. See also my post on procrasination here.here. 

Anxiety as an Alarm

Anxiety often signals unmet needs, unresolved conflicts, or perceived threats. Feeling anxious about a work project, for instance, may suggest the need for more preparation or support. Social anxiety may reflect how deeply a relationship or situation matters to you. In this sense, anxiety acts like a compass, pointing toward areas that need reflection or action.

It can also be an alarm that something feels unsafe. Sometimes this intuition is about the present, in which case taking action - leaving, seeking support, or setting boundaries — may be important. At other times, anxiety may echo difficult past experiences stirred up by current situations. Simply recognising this link can be helpful, and further reflection may open the way to greater understanding.

Reframing Anxiety

As Excitement: Anxiety and excitement are, physiologically, much the same. Anxiety might sometimes indicate that your current beliefs about yourself are at odds with what you’re doing. A person might, for example, push themselves outside their comfort zone by planning to give a public speech. Some of their anxiety may come from beliefs like: “I’m not good enough,” “I’ve got nothing worth saying,” or “Who do you think you are?” Such beliefs diminish or even kill off excitement about the new activity. Try tapping into your excitement. It’s okay to feel both. But these kind of beliefs can be linked with feelings of despondency and dejection, which may make it more challenging to access feelings of excitement. See also my post on depression here. 

As Openness: The therapist Wilfred Bion suggested that there should be two anxious people in the therapy room: the client and the therapist. Anxiety, in this sense, is part of openness - a willingness to sit with uncertainty and the unknown. Without anxiety, there can be no curiosity, no genuine encounter with oneself or another.

Rainer Maria Rilke expressed something similar: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

Our discomfort with uncertainty often drives us toward false certainties. We may catastrophise, doomscroll, or, conversely, cling to toxic positivity. These strategies may stabilise our anxiety, but they do little to reduce it. By contrast, staying open to uncertainty - however uncomfortable - creates room for personal growth.

How Therapy Can Help

Therapy provides a space where anxiety can be both soothed and heard. Somatic techniques (such as mindful breathing) can help calm the body, while reflective work can uncover what the anxiety is signalling - unmet needs, perfectionism, unresolved fears, or unarticulated desires.

Anxiety will never disappear entirely, but it does not have to dominate. By learning to live alongside it - to listen, question, and reframe it - anxiety can shift from being only a source of suffering to becoming a guide, pointing toward greater connection, vitality and personal agency. If this post resonates with you and are interested in exploring your reflections and feelings further within therapy, please feel free to get in touch here. I offer a free 20 minute video consultation.