Stress and Anxiety

Stress and anxiety are the body’s oldest alarm systems. There are versions of stress and anxiety that make sense. You have a deadline you haven’t met, a conversation you’re avoiding, a decision with real consequences, etc. The tension you feel in those moments has a purpose, it is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, generating enough discomfort in an attempt to force you into action. These versions are useful, but there are other versions, which cause intense psychological distress. The ones that show up without a reason, threat, or rational cause. Just a sense of uneasiness that you can’t precisely identify, sitting in your chest or behind your eyes, distracting you from a life that, by all appearances, is completely fine. This version is harder to make peace with, because you can’t argue with it using logic. This entry is about both kinds, but it is written primarily for the second kind. Because the first kind, justified stress, already has a clear enough path forward: act, adapt, it passes. The second kind lingers precisely because it has no clear path, and telling yourself you have no reason to feel it does not make it go away.

Definitions

Stress and anxiety are related, but not exactly the same. So that there is no misunderstanding, for this entry, I’m going to define the terms clearly, but not necessarily accurately. Stress is a response to something external: a situation, a demand, a perceived threat, etc. It rises when pressure arrives and, in theory, falls when the pressure lifts. On the other hand, anxiety is a response to something internal. It is the anticipation of a threat rather than the threat itself. It does not always require an external cause, which is what makes it so disorienting. It manufactures urgency interally, even if there is nothing that needs to be or can be done. That’s not to say it never has a direct cause, it is trying to force you to consider something more seriously, but sometimes it doesn’t have a valid purpose.

Biologically, both emotions activate the same system. The brain identifies a potential danger, real or imagined, and the body responds accordingly. Heart rate increases, attention narrows, muscles tighten, etc. This is the fight or flight response, and it is extraordinarily good at keeping you alive in situations where physical danger is the problem. The issue is that the brain does not reliably distinguish between actual danger (stress) and the thought of danger (anxiety). This means anxiety, at its core, is misdirection. The alarm is working, but it’s pointing at nothing, or pointing at a future that does not exist yet and may never exist at all. Again, that doesn’t mean it is inherently bad or pointless, just that it forces you to seriously consider something that may or may not deserve serious consideration.

Anxiety without a cause is sometimes leftover from previous stress that never fully resolved. Sometimes it’s genetic, a nervous system naturally calibrated toward vigilance. Sometimes it’s the result of a life that is moved too fast or too slow for too long, making the body forget how to stop bracing or eager for something more. And sometimes there isn’t a clear reason at all. Whatever its origin, it does not respond to the command to stop. You cannot think your way out of a physical state by telling the physical state that it is wrong.

Justified

When stress or anxiety is attached to something, use the feeling first instead of trying to eliminate it. The discomfort is telling you that something matters to you, that there are potential consequences, or that your mind has registered a gap between where you are and where you need to be. That is useful information, and you are either acting on it or marinating in it.

Productive engagement with justified stress looks something like this: you identify what you can actually influence or control, you determine how much influence you have over each variable, and you decide how to act on them. Most of the suffering attached to real stressors is not about the stressor itself, but about the endless mental rehearsal of worst case scenarios (anxiety) that may never happen. You can prepare for a difficult conversation without running it ten thousand times in your head before it happens. You can acknowledge that something is at stake without treating its potential failure as a guarantee. The uncertainty is the stressor, and the only way to deal with uncertainty is to experience the uncertain event so that it is no longer uncertain. In other words, you can’t tell it to go away, you just have to let it pass by experiencing whatever it is worried about.

Functional worrying is planning. It is the mind scanning for problems before they materialize so that you can be proactive about them. But worry can quickly become redundant, like when you have already identified the problem and the plan, and yet the mind keeps returning to it as though re-examining it will reveal something new. Which it does sometimes, but usually not anything worthwhile. More often than not, it’s just the mind coming up with more and more reasons to worry, which doesn’t really help.

The solution to justified stress is almost always action. Think about or write down what you are worried about and what you can do about each piece of it. Finish the step you have been avoiding. That is what the stress is trying to get you to do. Action interrupts anxiety in ways that thinking about action never will. And once you have done what you can do, you have to be willing to let the rest belong to the future, which is the only place it ever was anyway.

Unjustified

Everything is fine. You know everything is fine. You can make the argument to yourself, cite the evidence, and confirm that no catastrophe is imminent. And yet the feeling is still there. You are not anxious about anything in particular, but you are still anxious.

Fighting this doesn’t work. Telling yourself you have nothing to be anxious about is technically accurate yet completely useless. Anxiety does not respond to logical arguments because it did not arrive through logic, it arrived through the body, through a nervous system that is running a threat detection program in the absence of any actual threat. You cannot override a biological process with a counterargument. You can’t just buy a house if you’re homeless.

What actually helps is working with your body rather than against it. For one, physical movement is among the most reliable solutions available, not because it distracts you (although distraction is somewhat helpful), but because it gives the body what it wants. The body prepared itself for action, so giving it action will calm it down. A walk, some exercise, even a few minutes of any intentional physical effort can shift a state that hours of internal argument will not.

Breath is another strategy, one that I have found particular success with. The nervous system is not entirely involuntary, the breath is a point of direct access, and slow, deliberate exhales in particular activate the parasympathetic system, which is the body’s off switch for the alarm response. Extending the exhale to be longer than the inhale, such as a count of four or six in, a count of six or eight out, with pauses of four in between, is a concrete way to tell the body that the threat has passed, even if the mind is not sure it has. Practice this technique for at least a few minutes to see results. Make sure you breathe through your diaphragm, which just means your belly should rise and fall with each breath and exhale respectively. I recommend laying on your back as well, position yourself in whatever way feels most comfortable.

Additionally, you can try “grounding” the anxiety. The anxious mind tends to project, leaving the present and running scenarios in a future that has not happened yet. What you can do about this is identify something direct and concrete, like what is in the room right now. What you can hear, touch, or smell. What is actually happening in this moment, as opposed to what might happen in a future your nervous system is already bracing for. This, admittedly, sounds somewhat silly, but it does interrupt a mental process that has left the present entirely and is manufacturing threats in the abstract. Similarly to everything else, practice this for at least a few minutes to see results.

Maybe try naming the anxiety explicitly. Consciously naming it reduces its intensity by engaging other parts of your brain. “I am anxious right now” said or written plainly, without judgment, can change the experience of the feeling by creating distance between you and the emotion, enough distance to see it rather than be consumed by it. For those aware of the power of writing things down or journaling, this will intuitively make sense.

Also, there is behavioral engagement, or in simple terms, distraction. Anxiety survives on inaction and inward focus. It is much harder to be anxious in the presence of something that demands your full attention, like a task, conversation, physical activity, anything that requires you to be present and focus on something other than the feeling itself. If anxiety doesn’t have a way to intrude, then it simply can’t. For an unnecessarily stimulated nervous system, it’s not like distraction is inherently harmful.

This is not a completely exhaustive list of strategies, but it is a good place to start.

Furthermore, for the person whose anxiety regularly shows up without cause, it may be worth building consistent practices that reduce the system’s baseline arousal over time, rather than simply just waiting to manage episodes. This looks different for everyone. For some, it is daily physical exertion. For others, it is a reliable morning routine that provides a stable start before the day introduces its variables. For others, it is creative work, or time in nature, or some form of reflection that processes the internal accumulation before it compounds. For many, it’s some combination of these experiences. The specifics matter less than the consistency. The nervous system responds to patterns, so give it a predictable one.

What does not help, in the long run, is avoidance. There is a temporary way of managing anxiety by simply not doing anything that triggers it, like avoiding a hard but necessary conversation, not taking any risks, not entering any uncertain situations, etc. This keeps the discomfort low in the short term but does not solve the problem, it just avoids it entirely. If you avoid everything worth committing to and taking risks for, then you’re just living out of fear. It technically works, but it is an awfully unfulfilling way to live. And eventually, chronic dissatisfaction will likely become its own source of anxiety.

It is also worth examining whether the anxiety is actually unjustified. Sometimes what feels like anxiety for no reason is actually anxiety about something you have not yet admitted to yourself. A relationship that is off, a direction you are heading that you do not actually want, a life structure that does not quite fit, a task you’ve been avoiding, etc. The mind sometimes registers these things before you consciously acknowledge them. If the feeling is persistent, it may be worth sitting with the question of whether there is a problem you have not yet seen.

A Better Relationship

The elimination of stress and anxiety is both impossible and undesirable. A life without any stress is a life without stakes, without investment, and without anything that matters enough to trigger the alarm. Some anxiety before something important is appropriate because it means you care. Some stress is useful because it means you have commitments and purpose. The goal is to develop a relationship with these feelings that is functional rather than adversarial. A functional relationship with anxiety starts with not treating every instance of it as an emergency. The more you treat anxiety as alarming, the more alarming it becomes. The alternative is calm acknowledgment: something has activated the system, which is normal, it will pass, it might require action on my end, but it does not require immediate resolution.

This does require tolerance. Not necessarily patience, but the willingness to let discomfort exist without immediately trying to fix or escape it. Most anxiety driven behavior–the checking, the reassurance-seeking, the avoidance, the constant mental rehearsal–are attempts to reduce the discomfort of uncertainty in the short term. And it might work in the short term. The problem is that every time you escape the discomfort by these means, you teach the alarm system that the threat was real and that escape was the right response. In other words, you enable and condition it. Tolerance, on the other hand, teaches the system that the discomfort is survivable. For reference, you have survived every anxious moment you have ever had, without exception. Not that this means the consequences will always work out in your favor, but the state of anxiety is always survivable and never permanent, so escape is unnecessary and counterproductive.

Longer term, the factors that reduce the baseline level of anxiety are not complicated, though they require consistency. Physical health, including sleep, rest, physical activity, diet and nutrition, hydration, among other things, are all disproportionately important. An unhealthy nervous system is a more sensitized one, far more likely to misfire. The way you take care of your body, which your nervous system is obviously a part of, matters. It is not the only factor, but it is more of a factor than most people want to acknowledge. You don’t need to optimize your health, but you should take it seriously.

There is also something to be said for pattern recognition. If you can start to notice the conditions under which your anxiety spikes, like time of day, state of mind, or other specific circumstances, you gain a degree of predictive power that reduces its disorienting quality. It becomes less of a random occurrence and more of a known variable. You cannot always change the variable, but you can stop being surprised by it, and can perhaps plan for and around it, which reduces the anxiety’s effect.

A Better Life

Unfortunately, you cannot simply decide to stop feeling stress or anxiety, because they do have a purpose, however credible. This is just how the nervous system works. The practices that help are not fast and they are not perfect, but they are effective. Movement, breath, pattern recognition and implementation, tolerance, and engagement are adjustments to a biological system that has gotten stuck, and they work because they give the system what it wants, not because they override it with willpower.

Be patient with the process. The goal is not a life without stress and anxiety, but a life in which they do not make decisions for you, but encourage you. One in which you can feel them, acknowledge them, do what needs doing, and let them pass. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you have agency over it, which is the most that any of this can offer, and usually more than enough.

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