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 exist.
Now let’s take a quick step back. The fact is, these defining traits do not define you. They are not who you have always been or will always have to be. They do, however, define who you have become—through a lot of practice, mostly unconsciously, for years. Once you understand how anxiety works, you start to realize that you have put in a lot of work to be this good at anxiety. Yes, that sounds absurd because it feels like you have put an incredible amount of energy into relieving yourself of anxiety. But that is simply because you don’t know how anxiety works and therefore do not truly understand how you work. And that is the goal here—understand how anxiety works so that you can first deflate its power, and then second, redirect its power so that it actually starts working for you rather than against you.
While it’s not immediate, there’s a strange empowerment that comes from understanding how anxiety works. You soon realize that if you practiced your way into anxiety, you can practice your way out. And you can also practice your way into better ways of existing.
What’s actually happening
Anxiety might feel like it is core to who you are—like it’s a non-negotiable element of your being. It’s not.
Anxiety is 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
The trust is 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. And over time, you are left with well-worn grooves that shape how you see yourself, others, and the world.
Some are blessed with neurotransmissions that trigger favorable or neutral emotions, beliefs, and identities. Those who struggle with anxiety are more predisposed to negative responses to the same stimuli. Predisposition, however, is not a life sentence. It’s simply a push in a certain direction. It is very possible to not only push back, but also redirect the force of that push so that the energy driving anxiety drives feelings that are more positive.
For example
Let’s say you are a little more sensitive than most in social situations. In grade school, one afternoon, your friend invites you over to hang out with some new kids from their 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 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 bad for us and we should continue to avoid it and be fearful of it in the future. Over time, these repeated confirmations (uncertainty is bad) turn into beliefs about ourselves (I’m not some who handles social situations well), and then beliefs become identity (I’m socially 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 were born with a predisposition to respond in a certain way to certain stimuli. Your conscious and subconscious mind then worked in tandem tirelessly 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 threats; others are wired to notice opportunities. That wiring, however, just determines your starting line and your initial internal response to the events of your life. You have the power to choose different responses to the events of your life, even though it might feel unnatural. These unnatural responses, when done consistently, start to augment your original wiring. And over time, positive responses start to feel natural and anxiety, unnatural.
Anxiety isn’t a curse. It isn’t an identity. It’s an entitled neurotransmission that has never heard the word no. When you start telling it no, you start to right-size what has become an identity back to its 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 is the same path that can be taken to cultivate resilience, curiosity, and a host of other positive traits.
Yes, it will take effort, consistency, and a willingness to feel discomfort without defaulting to fear. But it is possible.
