It takes a lot of practice to be this good at anxiety
The Situation
Think of a trait you associate with anxiety—maybe you're shy, a perfectionist, indecisive, overly cautious. It probably feels like this is just who you are, who you’ve always been. And yes, you're a functioning adult—but to be this functioning adult, you’ve had to accept these traits and spend countless mental and emotional calories every day working around them. It’s exhausting, often painful, and at best, just not a very enjoyable way to live.
Now let’s take a quick step back. The fact of the matter is, these defining traits are not just how you were born. They are not who you have always been or will always have to be. They define who you have become through a lot of practice—mostly unconsciously, for years. Once you understand how anxiety works, you realize it takes a lot of work to be this good at axiety. And that is the goal here—understand how anxiety works so that we can first, deflate its power, and then second, redirect its power so that it actually start working for us rather than against us.
There’s a strange empowerment that comes from understanding how anxiety works. You realize that if you practiced your way into anxiety, you can practice your way out. And you can practice your way into better traits as well.
What’s actually happening
Anxiety might feel like an identity, but at its core, it’s simply a neurotransmission: one neuron passing a chemical message to another.
That’s it.
What message gets sent, how it's interpreted, and what action follows—that’s the machinery of anxiety. Nothing mystical. Nothing moral. Just brain wiring doing what brain wiring does.
And honestly, knowing how the brain works, it’s surprising we’re not more anxious.
Your brain fires off around 100 trillion neurotransmissions every second
It has 86 billion neurons, each forming up to 10,000 connections
Neurons fire 5 to 50 times per second
Most of your brain is doing great. It’s those pesky misfires that are the problem. And one misfire isn’t the issue. The problem is when one of these subconscious misfires gets repeated and goes unchallenged by your conscious mind, or worse, gets reinforced by it. Those repeated patterns become shortcuts. Shortcuts become habits. Habits become personality. Over time, they carve well-worn grooves that shape how you see yourself, others, and the world.
For example
Let’s say you are a little more sensitive than most in social situations. In grade school one afternoon, your friend Johnny invites you over to hang out with some new kids from his neighborhood. Sounds fun. You say yes. But then, a flicker of uncertainty hits. Not fear—just uncertainty.
If your nervous system has a bias toward anxiety, it might tag that feeling as fear. If it doesn’t, your body might interpret it as curiosity or even excitement.
Now imagine two paths:
You go, have a great time, and your brain learns: “Uncertainty can be uncomfortable, but can also leads to fun.”
Or—and this is far more common—you cancel last minute, or you go but spend the entire time stuck in your head, overthinking everything. Either way, the experience confirms: “Yep, that uncertainty was something to fear.”
The confirmation in the second scenario is often just perceived and not as bad as we believe it to be, nonetheless, it has taught our subconscious that uncertainty is not for us and we should continue to avoid it and be fearful of it in the future. Over time, these repeated neurotransmissions (uncertainty is uncomfortable) turn into beliefs about ourselves (I’m not some who handles social stuff well) , and then beliefs become our identify (I’m social inept).
This is how a single misfire becomes an identity. Today, you may in fact be shy or indecisive. But you weren’t born that way. You we’re born with a predisposition to respond in a certain way to certain stimuli. Your conscious and subconscious mind then worked in tandem for many years to nurture that small seed of a neurotransmission into a mighty oak of an identity.
The thing to remember
You are not broken. Your brain just got really good at practicing the wrong thing.
Some of us are more wired to detect threat; others are wired to notice opportunity. You didn’t choose your starting line—but you get to influence what happens next.
Anxiety isn’t a curse. It isn’t an identity. It’s an entitled neurotransmission that never heard the word no. When you start telling it no, you start to right-size what has become an identity back to it’s rightful place as a simple errant chemical transaction.
Not only can we rightsize our anxiety, we can also practice other traits we’d like to have. The path you took from neurotransmission to belief to an identity of shyness or indecision are the same steps that can be taken to cultivate resilience, curiosity, and others.
Yes, it will take effort, consistency, and a willingness to feel discomfort without defaulting to fear. But it is possible.
