Anxiety is not a personal failing, a mindset problem, or a sign that you “can’t relax”. It’s your body’s threat system doing its job. Sometimes the visit is brief and useful. Sometimes anxiety arrives, puts its feet up on the coffee table, and refuses to leave.
Most advice about anxiety is about getting rid of it: breathe, relax, think positive, calm down. Some of that advice genuinely helps. But there’s something about anxiety that much of this advice misses, and I think it explains why so many people try everything and still feel stuck.
Sometimes, the harder we try to make anxiety go away, the longer it stays.
What Anxiety Is Trying to Do
Anxiety prepares you for danger. It makes you more alert, tenses your muscles, speeds up your heart and your thinking. That’s very helpful if you’re stepping out in front of an oncoming car. It’s much less helpful when you’re lying awake at 2am replaying a conversation from 2017.
It shows up in the body as much as the mind: restlessness, tight shoulders or jaw, a churning stomach, a racing heart, shallow breathing. It shows up as irritability, as trouble concentrating, and as a kind of tiredness that surprises people. Anxiety is exhausting.
For some people, it settles into more persistent patterns, such as generalised anxiety, panic attacks, social anxiety or phobias. These have different names and look different from the outside, but they share a common thread: a threat system that has become very good at spotting danger, and much less good at standing down.
The Trouble With Getting Rid of It
Here’s the part that often surprises people.
When anxiety rises, it’s natural to do something to make it stop. We leave the situation. We avoid the next one. We check, reassure ourselves, distract, or reach for a technique to calm down. In the moment, it works. The anxiety drops, and we feel relief.
But that relief teaches the threat system something. It learns: that was dangerous, and we only got through it because we escaped. Next time, the alarm goes off a little sooner.
Psychologists call these strategies “safety behaviours”, and there’s good evidence that they play a part in keeping anxiety going. Even helpful tools, like breathing exercises, can work this way if we use them as an emergency exit: something we must do to get rid of the feeling, rather than a way of steadying ourselves while we stay.
I want to be careful here, because the picture isn’t simple. A 2016 review by Shannon Blakey and Jonathan Abramowitz found that the evidence on safety behaviours during therapy is mixed. Used thoughtfully, some may help people approach things they would otherwise avoid altogether. So it isn’t that coping tools are bad. It’s that how and why we use them matters.
The question to ask isn’t just “does this calm me down?” It’s “does this help me stay with my life, or help me escape from it?”
Tools That Help, and How to Use Them
With that in mind, there are things that genuinely help. Think of them less as ways to make anxiety vanish, and more as ways to bring your nervous system back within reach, so you can carry on.
Start with the body. An anxious body struggles to listen to logic, so this is often the place to begin.
Movement is one of the best-supported things you can do. You don’t need a fitness overhaul. Walking counts. Stretching counts. A large body of research has found that physical activity reduces anxiety, often noticeably.
Sleep matters more than most people realise. A 2019 study by Matthew Walker’s team at the University of California, Berkeley found that a single sleepless night raised anxiety levels by up to 30 percent in healthy adults. It was a small study, but it fits with what many people notice. So aim for consistency rather than perfection, and be kind to yourself after a bad night. A poor night’s sleep is data, not a judgement. It tells you something about your capacity the next day.
Regular meals help too. Long gaps without eating can bring on shakiness, a racing heart and irritability, which feel a lot like anxiety and can make it worse.
Slow your breathing, especially the out-breath. Try breathing in for a count of four and out for six. If counting annoys you, just make each breath out a little longer than the breath in. That’s enough. In a 2023 study at Stanford, people who spent five minutes a day on “cyclic sighing”, a breathing pattern that emphasises long, slow out-breaths, saw greater improvements in mood than people who practised mindfulness meditation. The study was small and mostly involved young, healthy students, so it’s an encouraging sign rather than the final word.
Tense, then release. Clench a group of muscles for a few seconds, then let go. Work your way around the body. This is less about forcing yourself to relax, and more about reminding your body what not tense feels like.
Be curious about your thoughts, not convinced by them. Anxiety is excellent at presenting opinions as facts. Instead of “this will go badly”, try “I’m having the thought that this will go badly”. That small step back creates a little distance. You can also ask yourself gently: what’s the evidence? What else might happen? You’re not arguing with your brain. You’re just widening the view.
Shrink the task. Anxiety loves vague, enormous goals. Break things into small, even boring, steps. Progress beats motivation every time.
Moving Towards, Not Away
Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do with anxiety is the least comfortable: gradually moving towards the things it tells you to avoid.
This is the idea behind exposure, one of the best-researched approaches to anxiety. You approach what frightens you in small, manageable steps, and allow the anxiety to be there without trying to escape it. Over time, the threat system learns something new: I felt anxious, I stayed, and I was OK. That learning is what helps anxiety soften, not the absence of the feeling.
Other approaches arrive at a similar place from different directions. Acceptance-based therapies encourage making room for anxiety rather than fighting it. And the existential psychologist Rollo May argued that some anxiety is simply part of living a full life: a sign that we’re facing something that matters to us, or stepping into the unknown.
None of this means forcing yourself into overwhelming situations. It means small steps, at a pace that feels challenging but bearable, ideally with support.
You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
Anxiety tends to isolate us, and connection interrupts that.
Talking to someone you trust can help, even if they don’t offer solutions. Being heard often takes some of the intensity out of anxiety on its own. Peer support groups can help too: there’s something steadying about hearing “me too”.
Therapy isn’t a last resort, either. Cognitive behavioural therapy has particularly strong evidence for anxiety, and other approaches can help as well, especially when anxiety is tangled up with older patterns, with loss, or with questions about how you want to live. At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU, and we can draw on whichever approaches suit you best.
When It’s Worth Seeing Your GP
If your anxiety is new, has changed suddenly, or comes with strong physical symptoms such as chest pain, palpitations or breathlessness, it’s worth seeing your GP. Some physical conditions, such as thyroid problems, as well as some medications and lots of caffeine, can cause symptoms that feel like anxiety. It’s always worth ruling those out.
One Slower Breath
Anxiety doesn’t disappear because you tried hard enough to make it go. It tends to soften when your nervous system learns, again and again, that it’s safe enough, supported enough, and not alone. Progress is often uneven. That’s normal.
If anxiety is running the show, getting help isn’t weakness or failure. It’s a sensible response to a system under strain.
And if today all you managed was reading this and taking one slower breath, that still counts.
If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further
If you’re interested in anxiety as part of being human rather than only a problem to fix, Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) is a classic. It’s philosophical, but deeply humane.
For a practical introduction to making room for anxiety rather than fighting it, Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap is a clear, accessible guide to acceptance and commitment therapy.
If you’d like a structured self-help approach, Helen Kennerley’s Overcoming Anxiety is a well-regarded CBT-based guide from the UK’s Overcoming series.
And if you’d like to look at the research directly:
Blakey and Abramowitz’s review of safety behaviours in anxiety (2016): RTI International
How one sleepless night affects anxiety: ZME Science summary
The Stanford study on breathing practices and mood: Simply Psychology summary