Anxiety: when trying to feel better makes things worse

In recent years, anxiety has become an increasingly prominent part of my clinical work. I encounter it particularly often among younger people, but I also find myself noticing it more in everyday life and in the people around me.

Anxiety itself is, of course, not new. It is part of being human and serves an important function. What feels different to me is not simply its presence, but our relationship with it. There seems to be less tolerance for uncertainty, discomfort, mistakes and the possibility of things not going as planned. I find myself wondering whether, in our genuine efforts to make people feel safer, understood and supported, we may also have made ordinary psychological discomfort more difficult to tolerate.

This is something I think about as a psychologist, but also as a mother and a colleague. Over the years, I have come to believe that anxiety itself is often not the biggest problem. The struggle not to feel anxious can become an even greater one. When anxiety becomes something that must be avoided, people gradually begin organising their lives around it. They postpone decisions, avoid difficult conversations, seek reassurance, check repeatedly, prepare excessively or analyse every possible outcome.

These strategies make sense because they work, at least temporarily. Avoidance brings relief. Reassurance reduces uncertainty. Checking creates a sense of control. But what reduces anxiety today can strengthen it tomorrow. Every time we avoid something because it feels too uncomfortable, we lose an opportunity to discover that perhaps we could have managed it. Gradually, and often without noticing, anxiety begins making more and more of our decisions, and we perceive ourselves as less and less capable.

This is one of the challenges of therapy. I am often asking someone to do something that initially feels counterintuitive: to stop making the absence of anxiety a condition for doing things. This does not mean enjoying anxiety or pretending that distress is unimportant. It means learning to tolerate some uncertainty and discomfort while continuing to move towards what matters.

I have also become increasingly interested in the relationship between anxiety and control. Many anxious people I work with are highly capable. They anticipate problems, plan carefully and take responsibility. These qualities may contribute enormously to their success. The difficulty comes when control stops being a useful strategy and becomes a necessity.

• I can cope if I know what is going to happen.
• I can make the decision when I know it is the right one.
• I can relax when I know my child is okay.

But life rarely provides these guarantees. Parenthood made this particularly clear to me. We can prepare, protect and support our children, but we cannot (and should not) remove uncertainty from their lives, or from our own.

This leaves me with a question that is relevant not only in therapy, but also in parenting, education and the workplace: when should we make things easier for someone, and when might doing so unintentionally communicate that the person cannot cope?

There is no simple answer. Support matters. Compassion matters. Accommodations can be essential. But so does the experience of discovering: this was difficult, I was anxious, and I managed. Or: it was difficult, but now I know what not to do next time.

I think this is particularly important for younger people. We need to provide safety and support, but we also need to help them discover that they can function when they do not feel completely safe, certain or comfortable.

This has influenced the questions I ask in therapy. Rather than asking only, "How can we reduce this anxiety?", I am increasingly interested in asking, "What is this anxiety preventing you from doing?"

Of course, I want the people I work with to suffer less. We have effective psychological interventions for anxiety, and symptom reduction matters. But I do not think that a life without anxiety should be the goal.

Anxiety often appears precisely where something matters. Relationships involve the possibility of rejection. Decisions involve uncertainty. Trying something new involves the possibility of failure.

For me, one of the most meaningful moments in therapy is therefore not necessarily hearing: "I'm not anxious anymore."

It is hearing:

I was anxious. And I did it anyway.