The Hidden Emotional Life of Anxiety
Author: Kelsey Crowe
When someone comes to therapy struggling with anxiety, there’s an almost reflexive urge—in our culture, in our profession, even in our own minds—to immediately offer the standard toolkit. Meditation apps, breathing exercises, mindfulness practices, cognitive restructuring. Sometimes people arrive having already tried these approaches: “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do for my anxiety. I meditate, I exercise, I practice breathing techniques. So why do I still feel like this?” Other times, they haven’t tried them yet, but you can sense the expectation that this is where we’ll head—toward the same strategies they could find on Instagram or ChatGPT.
It’s a fair expectation, given how we talk about anxiety management. We’ve become very good at teaching people how to cope with anxiety—how to breathe through it, think differently about it, distract themselves from it. But we’ve paid less attention to what anxiety actually is, emotionally speaking, and what it might be trying to communicate.
The Emotional Archaeology of Anxiety
Anxiety rarely exists in isolation. More often, it could be the visible manifestation of emotions that have been pushed aside, sometimes for very good reasons. Consider the possibility that someone who grew up in a household where expressing anger was forbidden might develop social anxiety later in life. Years of unexpressed frustration and resentment could transform into a constant worry about what others think, a persistent fear of saying or doing something wrong.
When we suppress emotions, they don’t simply disappear. They may find other ways to surface. Buried sadness might emerge as a persistent inner voice insisting we’re not good enough. Unexpressed anger could manifest as obsessive self-criticism or worry that extends beyond ourselves to the people we care about. We might find ourselves asking: What if something happens to them? What if I let them down? What if they leave me?
This isn’t a character flaw or a sign of weakness. Research in emotion regulation shows that suppressed emotions often return in more intrusive forms, potentially creating exactly the kind of mental loops that fuel anxiety. The feelings we try not to feel may have a way of demanding our attention anyway.
The Precision of Emotional Language
One of the patterns that emerges in anxiety is how difficult it can become to identify what we’re actually feeling beyond “stressed” or “overwhelmed.” Anxiety can be so consuming that it drowns out more specific emotional signals. This is where something as simple as a feelings wheel—a diagram that breaks emotions down into specific categories and subcategories—might be surprisingly illuminating.
When someone moves from saying “I’m anxious” to recognizing “I’m feeling rejected” or “I’m feeling trapped,” something could shift. UCLA researchers have found that the simple act of labeling emotions more precisely activates the brain’s regulatory systems and reduces emotional intensity (Lieberman et al., 2007). There may be something powerful about naming what’s actually happening rather than defaulting to the catch-all of anxiety.
This specificity could matter because different emotions carry different information. Feeling rejected might tell us something about our need for connection. Feeling trapped could point to a desire for autonomy or change. Feeling inadequate might reveal how much we’re relying on external validation. When anxiety scrambles these signals, we may lose access to valuable information about what we need and what matters to us.
The Seductive Appeal of Anxiety as Fuel
There’s another reason anxiety can be particularly hard to release: it often feels useful. Many high-functioning people may have learned to harness their anxiety as a kind of performance enhancer. The adrenaline, the hypervigilance, the sense of urgency—these could genuinely improve focus and motivation in the short term.
It’s possible to think of anxiety as “premium fuel.” It might make someone thorough, prepared, always anticipating problems before they arise. Anxiety could help build successful careers, and the idea of letting it go might feel like voluntarily handicapping oneself.
But anxiety-as-fuel likely comes with a cost. The body can only sustain that level of activation for so long. What initially feels like productive energy could eventually become exhausting motion without meaningful progress. People might get caught in what could be called the productive-anxiety loop—staying busy to avoid feeling, but finding that the buried feelings make every decision more difficult, every choice more fraught.
From Fighting to Carrying
The conventional approach to anxiety often involves some version of fighting it—challenging anxious thoughts, using techniques to calm the nervous system, working to eliminate uncomfortable feelings. These strategies have their place, but they may also reinforce the idea that anxiety is fundamentally an enemy to be defeated.
What if, instead, we approached anxiety more like an uninvited but not necessarily dangerous companion? This isn’t about welcoming anxiety or trying to feel grateful for it. It could be about learning to carry difficult feelings without being overwhelmed by them—to acknowledge their presence without letting them dictate our actions.
This shift might require a kind of emotional courage that goes against our instincts. Most of us have been taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that negative emotions are problems to be solved quickly. The idea of sitting with discomfort, of allowing anxiety to exist without immediately trying to fix it, could feel counterintuitive and even reckless.
Yet research on exposure therapy consistently shows that avoidance strengthens anxiety while gradual acceptance weakens it (see Systematic Review of Exposure Therapy Mechanisms and Simply Psychology overview). The practice might become learning to say, “I notice fear right now, and I can let that be here while I take this next step.”
When Emotions Become Information
Perhaps the most profound shift happens when we begin to see emotions—including the difficult ones—as potential sources of information rather than problems to eliminate. That anxiety about an overloaded schedule might be pointing toward a need for better boundaries. Worry about a relationship could be highlighting issues that need attention. Social anxiety might be revealing something important about the environments or people we choose to surround ourselves with.
This doesn’t mean that every anxious thought contains profound wisdom or that we should act on every emotional impulse. But it could suggest that our feelings, even the uncomfortable ones, often have something valuable to tell us about our needs, our values, and our circumstances.
When we approach emotions this way—as potential allies rather than enemies, as information rather than interference—the entire project of managing anxiety might change. Instead of focusing solely on symptom reduction, we could work toward emotional intelligence. Instead of just surviving difficult moments, we might learn from them.
The Long View
Managing anxiety isn’t about achieving some perfect state of calm or eliminating all worry from our lives. Anxiety, in manageable doses, serves important functions—it motivates us to prepare for challenges, alerts us to potential threats, and signals when something matters to us.
The goal could be developing a different relationship with anxiety, one that’s less adversarial and more collaborative. It might be learning to hear what our emotions are trying to tell us without being overwhelmed by them. It could be discovering that we can feel anxious and still be brave, still make thoughtful decisions, still show up for the people and experiences we care about.
Because here’s what I’ve learned, both as a therapist and as someone who has wrestled with anxiety in my own life: our feelings aren’t necessarily obstacles to overcome. They might be the very compass pointing us toward what we need to understand, address, or change. When we stop fighting them and start listening, we could discover that emotional courage isn’t the absence of difficult feelings—it’s the willingness to let them teach us something about how to live.
References
Craske, M.G. et al. (2023). Exposure Therapy: Mechanisms of Change. Frontiers in Psychology.
Lieberman, M.D. & Kross, E. (2014). Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation. Emotion Review.