The Secret Benefits of Anxiety

Anxiety is one of the most common experiences we have as human beings. It can be a natural reaction to occasional stressful events, but for some of us it is a constant state. Many think of it as a version of fear, and fear may certainly be present with anxiety, but anxiety is more complicated than that. Anxiety has a few functions that can be helpful to understand. When we understand that anxiety can be a teacher, we may be able to soften it a little bit and find out what it’s trying to teach us.

Anxiety Helps Us Identify Our Needs

The experience of anxiety tends to be very mental: Thoughts spiral, and we can feel energy move into the hands and head, and sometimes in the stomach and chest. These symptoms can be very intense and demand our full attention. It can sometimes feel like a survival response. (Because it is!) Anxiety tells us that there is something we need to pay attention to right now, and that we have to figure out what it is or (our systems feel) we could die.

But the function of all of that energy and intensity may actually be about distracting our systems from something deeper. It could be fear, but it could also be anger, grief, or another core emotion. If our system perceives that those core emotions are unsafe or can’t be resolved, it will give us anxiety instead, keeping us locked up in spiraling thoughts so that we don’t touch those scarier emotions.

For example, anger’s function is to signal that our needs are not being met, our boundaries are being crossed, or that an injustice is happening that must be stopped. If your system believes that expressing this anger won’t get your needs met or your boundaries respected (or that you could put yourself in danger in some way), it could insist you focus on anxiety instead. If we grew up in a home where expressing emotions was unsafe or useless, never getting us what we needed, we might have learned long ago that there’s no point in accessing deep emotions. Anxiety can be a strategy to keep those emotions at bay.

In my experience, it’s easier to work on discovering what sits beneath the anxiety by enlisting a compassionate witness, like a safe friend or therapist, rather than doing it alone. Sometimes it helps to remind the system that it’s okay to feel an emotion, and that we don’t have to do anything about what we feel until and unless we’re sure it’s safe to do so.

Anxiety Has Energy

I love the saying that “anxiety is just depression that hasn’t given up yet.” Anxiety and depression are so close in their function—both dissociative, both keeping us from feeling deeper emotions, both placing us in a constant state of emotional unsafety. Anxiety puts us too close to the fight-or-flight survival responses. Depression puts us too close to the freeze-or-collapse survival responses. In either case, the nervous system is dysregulated and stuck in survival mode.

But anxiety has energy and movement. Anxiety can be functional in a world that doesn’t have a lot of respect for stillness and slowness. For many people, anxiety has enhanced their function at work, pushing them to work more, try harder, and never settle.

Anxiety can come with a general sense that one is not good enough and must work harder to be more worthy of love, belonging, survival, and so on. Depression can feel more like helplessness or hopelessness; one is not good enough, but there’s no sense in trying harder as things will never get better. Despite its bad points, anxiety can feel more empowering for some of us than being stuck in depression, even if the core experience is essentially the same.

Anxiety Is a Signal

The thing to understand about anxiety is that it uses our thoughts. The anxious feeling begins in the body, and the brain helpfully fills in the gaps, often with old core beliefs about how we’re not good enough or are destined to fail. The thoughts that come with anxiety may or may not have any real relationship to reality.

Anxiety arises because the nervous system has perceived a threat (whether real or an illusion). Something is out of balance, but it’s not always clear if that something is internal or external, past or present. If we can slow down and get curious about what the anxiety is signaling, we may be able to see beneath its smoke and mirrors and figure out what’s really going on.

Anxiety is an incredibly uncomfortable state, but like every feeling state we have access to, it has a purpose and a meaning. Listen to your anxiety—not for what it’s explicitly telling you, but for what it might be distracting you from. It might just have some wisdom to share.

Learn how to use the ancient practice of alchemy to transform anxiety into something useful.