“Living with anxiety” is a phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot on the internet these days (I’m looking at you, TikTok). Whenever I see this phrase, a part of me dies a little inside. It has become normalized to suffer through anxiety every day, trying everything you know just to survive, never feeling fully content.

The truth is, life doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, feeling constant anxiety is not a normal state to live in. Take it from someone who has struggled with anxiety throughout her life: there are ways to tell the difference between normal anxiety, and needless daily suffering.

To know the difference, it is crucial to understand a little bit more about why anxiety exists in the first place.

In therapy, one of the first things I teach my clients is that all emotions exist for a reason. Yes, this even includes the emotions we don’t particularly like feeling, such as anxiety. Fortunately, this is great news because it means we don’t feel painful emotions for no reason - hooray!

So, why do we feel anxiety? One way to think of anxiety is like your brain’s alarm system. Anxiety is on the lookout for any potential threats to well being, whether those be physical or emotional threats. If your alarm system detects a potential upcoming threat, the emotion is meant to trigger an appropriate response from you to prepare accordingly.

In certain situations, this works really well. Let’s say you have an important exam coming up, but you’ve barely touched your books. In this instance, you’d likely feel anxiety every time you thought about that exam. This is what’s known as adaptive anxiety. The emotion is pushing you prepare for the exam more, an appropriate response for an upcoming exam that you’ve barely studied for.

However, let’s say a different student has studied day in and day out for the same exam. There’s nothing more they could possibly due to prepare for the exam, and every time they test themselves, they prove that they know their stuff. Yet, they still feel a crippling amount of anxiety just thinking about it, causing them to overwork themselves. This is known as maladaptive anxiety. In other words, this person’s alarm system is sensing an upcoming threat where there is none. This is a common experience that causes unnecessary suffering in many people’s lives.

In the first session, I will spend time getting to know you. I will ask you about your history with anxiety, what it is like in present day, who the important people in your life are, and what your day-to-day life looks like. We will also set goals for therapy. You will have the opportunity to ask me questions about myself, and/or the therapy process overall. If there is something you are not quite ready to talk about in the first session, don’t worry. I know I am still a stranger to you and trust building takes time! I will never pressure you to talk about something before you are ready.

Yes, it is not only possible - I’ve helped multiple clients do it! There are usually other underlying factors causing a person’s anxiety to spike unnecessarily throughout the day. While anxiety is necessary at times, it is not necessary to live with on a constant basis for the rest of your life. The underlying factors that cause pervasive anxiety are unique to each individual, the good news is that therapy with a skilled practitioner can help you discover and heal the root causes. At Illuminate Therapy, I can help you learn to recognize the difference between normal anxiety and needless suffering, develop emotion regulation skills, and heal the fundamental reasons anxiety developed in the first place. Before you resign yourself to living this way, I encourage you to ask yourself - when did you decide that living with anxiety was good enough for you?