Stop Fighting Anxiety: Why Trying to Make It Go Away Keeps It Around
You notice the anxiety rising and you go to work on it immediately. Breathe differently, talk yourself down, distract, analyze, and push it back under the surface. Sometimes it works for a minute, but then it's back, and this time it brought a second layer with it. Anxiety about the anxiety, a low grade of dread that the first wave might return at any moment. The strange part is that the times anxiety loosens its grip are usually the times you weren't fighting it at all.
This isn't a coincidence, and it isn't about giving up or resigning yourself to feeling bad forever. It's about how the nervous system interprets effort. When you treat a feeling as an emergency that needs to be eliminated right now, your body reads that urgency as confirmation that something is wrong, which activates the exact threat response producing the anxiety in the first place. Struggling against the sensation doesn't calm the anxiousness. It answers the anxiousness's question, is this dangerous?, with a clear yes, every single time you fight it.
This is close to the same mechanism behind thought suppression, where trying not to think about something requires constantly monitoring for it, which keeps it active. Anxiety works in a similar same way at the level of sensation instead of thought. Trying not to feel anxious requires constantly scanning your body for anxiety, checking whether it's still there, whether it's worse, whether your efforts are working, and that scanning process is itself a form of sustained threat monitoring. You can't successfully hunt down a feeling and eliminate it without keeping your entire system oriented toward finding it, which is the opposite of what settling requires.
There's also a physiological piece that makes the struggle particularly exhausting. Anxiety produces real sensations, a racing heart, tight chest, restless energy, and fighting those sensations adds a second layer of arousal directly on top of the first. Your body is already activated by the anxiety, and now it's activated again by the effort of resisting the anxiety, which is why full-on struggle sessions with anxiety tend to leave people more depleted than the anxiety itself would have if left alone. The fight costs more energy than the feeling does.
The shift that helps is closer to willingness than resignation, letting the sensation be present without treating its presence as a crisis requiring immediate resolution. This looks less like relaxing on command, which rarely works and often backfires the same way suppression does, and more like continuing to do whatever you were doing, with the anxiety along for the ride instead of in the driver's seat. The sensation is allowed to exist without earning your full attention or your emergency response.
This is genuinely counterintuitive to practice because everything in you is built to treat physical activation as a call to action. Learning to let a wave of anxiety move through without fighting it usually isn't something people figure out through willpower alone. For people whose nervous system learned early and thoroughly that any sign of distress required immediate management, that pattern often traces back further than the current anxiety itself, into an earlier period where vigilance genuinely was necessary. Working that underlying activation directly, through approaches like Deep Brain Reorienting or Ego State Therapy, can change the baseline relationship to distress, not just manage this week's symptoms.
If this pattern has been running your days, it's worth hearing clearly: the fact that fighting anxiety hasn't worked isn't a sign you haven't tried hard enough. It's a sign the fight was never the way out. If you're in Tucson or anywhere in Arizona and this cycle has been hard to interrupt on your own, reaching out to work with it directly can help you build a different relationship to anxiety, one that doesn't depend on winning a fight against your own nervous system.
This article is intended for general informational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical assessment. If anxiety is significantly affecting your daily life, a licensed therapist can help identify what's happening and what will actually help.
Nathanael "Nando" Schlecht, LAC, is a trauma therapist in Tucson, AZ, specializing in nervous system regulation, OCD and intrusive thoughts, Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), and Ego State Therapy. He works with adults navigating chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, and the exhausting cycle of fighting their own nervous system, offering telehealth across Arizona including Phoenix, Scottsdale, Flagstaff, and Sedona. Learn more at nandotherapy.com, or to inquire about working together, visit /therapy-contact.
For more reflections on the nervous system, trauma, and what it means to change, subscribe to The Regulated Mind on Substack.
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