The Anxiety that’s there when you awake.
There’s a particular morning experience you might be familiar with if you have generalised anxiety You surface from sleep and the anxiety is already there, waiting, like it got up before you did. No bad news arrived overnight and yet your body is jittery, your chest is tight, and your mind has already started producing a stream of worries before you lift your head off the pillow.
I make no secret of having experienced this myself – not so much now, after 30-odd years of practice, but certainly in my twenties. I recall one summer in London, just before university, when a friend announced he was moving back into the flat he’d lent me. I spent a frantic week hunting for somewhere affordable on a student grant. For a while it seemed I might be officially homeless, but just in time I found a room through the University notice board. The searching had been jittery and worrying; the jitters, oddly, did not stop once I’d found somewhere. Every morning they came up, followed by a list of trivial worries: about the other housemates, about rent increases that never happened, about some new shock that might be coming. That hyper-vigilance faded only very gradually.
If this sounds familiar, you’ll also recognise what I call ‘alarm jumping’: the way an anxious charge about one thing – a rude email, your heart missing a beat, a forgotten payment – leaps to something else entirely within seconds. The email becomes a coming conflict, the heart flutter a sign of mortal illness, the payment a prelude to the electricity being cut off. By lunchtime you’re anxious about three unrelated things and can’t remember which one started it.
Take Tania (not her real name, and something of a composite – the pattern is common enough that it doesn’t belong to any one person). She came to see me describing exactly this: a low, constant hum of dread with no obvious source. Her job was fine. Her marriage was Ok. Her finances were, by her own account, “boring, in a good way.” And still she woke every morning at half past five with her heart going like she’d just run five miles. What she wanted, understandably, was an explanation. Something was surely very wrong with her.
This is usually where people go wrong, and it’s worth pausing to examine why.
Anxiety isn’t personal – until you make it so
What Tania told me is common enough in therapy, and yet the idea that there was something wrong with her is mistaken. Anxiety is a brain-generated state, produced automatically when the brain compares an event to a troublesome memory (often outdated) and releases its alarm mechanism (nearly always exaggerated). It has nothing to do with you as a person – it is not evidence that you are flawed, broken, or that you’ve lost your ability to cope. It’s a sign your brain is over-reacting to uncertainty, which is one reason anxiety is more common in the young than the old: the mature brain has generally learnt to tolerate uncertainty before jumping to panicky conclusions.
The moment you believe the anxiety shows something wrong with you, rather than with it, the hole opens wide. Two reactions escalate the state from there. The first comes from you: horror, resistance, the urge to fix and correct. The brain reads that reaction as confirmation there’s a real threat, and intensifies the alarm. The second is shame – fear of what the alarm means about you as a person, laced with the idea that you’re responsible for it and should be doing better.
That combination is what feeds the loop. Not the original spike, which would pass on its own in minutes, but the story built over it. All the anxiety that follows really is about ‘everything and nothing’.
What’s actually happening in the Anxiety chamber?
I’ll keep the neuroscience short, because dressing it up in more technical language than necessary risks obscuring the central point: the anxiety is created by your misfiring brain, not by you.
Your brain runs on what researchers call predictive processing: rather than passively reacting to the world, it’s constantly generating predictions about what’s about to happen, then checking incoming data against them. When the world matches the prediction, nothing much happens, which is why most days you don’t notice the mechanism at all. When something doesn’t match, you get a jolt of attention – manufactured by what I call, in my book FLOAT, the Threat Detector: a primitive part of the brain whose entire purpose is to shout first and let other centres work out what the fuss was about later.
Two other systems get involved. The Analyst makes sense of the alarm after the fact, gathering evidence and ideas about it. The Storyteller turns whatever the Analyst comes up with into a coherent, often catastrophic account of what the anxiety means and where it’s heading. Between them, the three can turn a routine setback into a fully worked-out crisis before you’ve finished your first cup of tea.
Neuroplasticity explains why this gets worse rather than better on its own: the brain strengthens whatever pathway it uses most, so every time the Threat Detector fires, the circuit gets a little faster, a little more automatic. Over time it builds something close to a superhighway, requiring very little provocation to send you hurtling down it. The explanation behind alarm jumping lies there, since almost any input can now be routed onto the same well-worn pathway.
Understanding the mechanism only tells you what’s producing the anxiety. It doesn’t, by itself, change your relationship to it – knowing you have a Threat Detector doesn’t switch it off, any more than knowing how a smoke alarm works stops it going off when you make toast. How you change that relationship comes later.
So why doesn’t Anxiety go away?
This is the question that brings most people with chronic anxiety to therapy. It’s easy enough to grasp that anxiety connects to one specific event. Harder to understand is why it keeps happening, day after day.
The answer can be given in one word: hypervigilance.
When your Threat Detector has been running hot for a while – a stressful patch at work, a health scare, a difficult month – it doesn’t simply reset once the problem resolves. It stays sensitised, its firing threshold dropped, so that cues far too small to register normally become sufficient: a delayed phone call, a stranger’s expression on the train, the quality of silence in a house at 6 a.m.
This is also why anxiety doesn’t switch off once the facts improve. Last week’s crisis may be resolved – the bill paid, work settled – and still the alarm sounds, because the system was never listening to the facts. It was listening for pattern-matches to threat, at a sensitivity setting turned up far too high. You can’t pacify a hypervigilant amygdala with evidence, which is exactly why trying to is so frustrating.
The trap of the fixing Self
The final reason anxiety won’t switch off might be you, yourself.
Once you make anxiety personal, the natural next step is aversion. But that resistance confirms to the brain that there are now two threats: the original trigger, and the anxiety you now have about the anxiety. Each time you check whether it’s gone, the brain notices, and amplifies it.
The same goes for many fixes learned in therapy. A breathing exercise practised in the hope of suppressing the anxious state tends to amplify it; so does arguing the thoughts away, or distracting yourself with your phone. Every check-in brings the anxiety back into focus, and the brain concludes there are now two threats – the original trigger, and your attempts to overcome it, otherwise known as meta-anxiety. What you’re left with is a loop, in which your entanglement with the thoughts and feelings maintains and prolongs the problem.
The way out of the Anxiety loop
The Float approach starts from a different premise: the anxious state doesn’t need fixing, resisting, or defeating, because it was never a verdict on you. It’s a brain-generated state, produced by systems doing exactly what they evolved to do. What changes things isn’t a better argument against the anxiety, or a harder fight against it – it’s a shift in your relationship to it. Understanding what’s producing it, noticing it as it arises, accepting it as a passing state rather than a personal failing, and witnessing it – watching the Threat Detector generate the alarm, the Analyst generate the worry, the Storyteller predict the catastrophe.
This is what I mean by second-order change, borrowing a distinction from the Palo Alto school of therapy: rather than fixing the problem by pushing back against it, you stay with it in awareness, allowing it to be whatever the brain wants it to be, watching the thoughts, feelings and urges to correct as they pass through. In doing that you send a covert signal to the brain: whatever you imagine you’re doing, it’s of no interest to me.
It might sound too simple to work. In my experience – personal as well as clinical – it’s the only thing that does, in the long run, with anxiety that keeps coming back for no apparent reason.
Listen to the podcast: Float: The Anxiety Podcast – Why Do We Feel Anxious for No Reason?
Brief Therapy for Anxiety described here
Free guide: Why Anxiety Won’t Go Away (And What You Can Do Next) – Link here
The book: FLOAT: Exiting the Anxiety-Stress Loop, out now. Click here for the Amazon link
Appointments: For therapy for anxiety click here to make an appointment.