What is the Float Approach to Anxiety?
The thing most people with anxiety suffer from is not just the anxiety itself. Rather, it is the repetitive, intrusive way it keeps returning. When you have a job to go to, or a gathering to attend, you really just want to work and play. Instead your mind fills with worrisome ideas, your body feels panicky, and the thought of going ahead anyway fills you with dread.
You might turn to the fixes you have been shown. A breathing activity, a calming procedure, a thought-changing process. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t – especially when the anxious feeling seems overwhelming. And even when the fixes do work it tends to be temporary – a few hours, or days, later and back it comes. No wonder most anxious people I know are also deeply frustrated.
Most people who struggle with anxiety are not short of effort. They have read the books, done some therapy, downloaded some apps, learned the techniques, challenged their thoughts, and practiced mindfulness. They understand their patterns, sometimes in considerable detail. And still the anxiety returns. If that describes you, the problem won’t be from lack of trying – it will be from trying too hard.
That is the paradoxical idea at the centre of my book, FLOAT, and of the approach it describes. This is a short account of how that approach works, and why it asks something so different from the usual advice. However, the main idea can be summarised this way:
The way out of anxiety loops is to give up resisting them, and learn to float by them.
Anxiety: Just the brain doing its job
To understand anxiety, it helps to abandon the idea that it is a flaw, a weakness, or a sign that something has gone wrong with you. Anxiety is the work of a brain doing exactly what brains are designed to do.
The brain is, in essence, a prediction machine. Sealed inside the skull, it never has direct access to the world; it works from stored assumptions and past experience, making its best guess about what is out there and what is about to happen. Most of the time this works well enough that we never notice it. But when the machinery runs to threat, it produces the familiar sequence: an alarm that fires before we can think, a rush of analysis trying to solve the danger, and a story that narrates the whole affair in a voice that sounds like our own.
In the book I describe these as three characters on a kind of internal committee. There is the Threat Detector, the ancient alarm that fires first and asks questions later. There is the Analyst, the problem-solver that turns every feeling into a puzzle and does not know when to stop. And there is the Storyteller, the inner narrator that spins a frightening tale about the future and casts us as its anxious lead. None of these is malfunctioning. They are doing their jobs a little too well, in a modern society that rarely presents the kind of clear-cut physical threat they were built for.
The key idea: when anxiety arises that is a sign of a misfiring brain – not a commentary on you.
Thoughts Are Not Produced By You
One of the strangest features of anxiety is how personal it feels. The worried thoughts arrive in your own voice, seeming to report the truth about your situation. This is awful. I am not coping. Something is seriously wrong with me. Because they sound like you, it is natural to treat them as your considered judgements rather than as what they are: automatic productions of a nervous brain.
Overthinking, in its various forms, is the clearest example. Worry runs a conveyor belt of alarming speculations about what might happen. Rumination turns the same machinery on the self, replaying past conversations and decisions. Perfectionism cannot let a task go. What these have in common is that they are repetitive loops the brain cannot switch off, not deliberate acts of thinking you are choosing to perform. Research suggests overthinking is not a failure of intelligence but a kind of stickiness, in which attention becomes caught on material that carries dreadful weight and keeps returning to it, and each return invites further analysis of something that cannot be resolved by thinking at all.
Feelings work the same way. A wave of anxiety is not a message that must be decoded or a problem that must be solved. It is a set of bodily events: a tightening, a quickened heart, a lurch in the stomach. Broken down and looked at directly, these components are far less overwhelming than the single alarming whole they seem to form. The word “unbearable” turns out to be a verdict the brain has passed, not a description of the sensation itself.
Key: If your thoughts are not yours then you don’t necessarily have to do anything about them
Anxiety, stress, and stuckness
There is a practical cost to all this, beyond the discomfort. Anxiety interferes with the very thing that would help: effective action in the real world.
The stress response evolved to prepare the body for a burst of decisive activity. But anxiety interferes with effective actions. Since the brain is caught in a loop of its own making: going over and over its exaggerated predictions, and the anxious response they generate, it has little time left over for anything else.
The person overwhelmed by worry about a decision is, precisely because of the worry, less able to make it. Instead she gets caught in analysis-paralysis. The energy that might have gone into addressing what can be addressed is consumed instead by the internal weather.
This is why the loop is so exhausting and so unproductive. It feels like doing something – the mind is working hard – but it is work that produces nothing except more loops.
Key: Floating by anxiety leaves you free to deal with real-life problems
Two types of problem: soluble and insoluble.
Here we reach the heart of the matter, and the point most people miss when they are caught in the loop.
For the ordinary problems of life – a leaking roof, a difficult conversation, a decision about work – a fixing attitude is exactly right. You identify the problem, weigh the options, and act. This is what I call first-order change: sensible, practical, effective. Nobody would suggest you “accept” a leaking roof rather than repair it.
But anxiety is a different kind of problem, and the fixing attitude that serves us so well with the roof is precisely what keeps anxiety alive. Every attempt to argue with an anxious feeling, suppress it, or make it go away sends the brain a message: this alarm was worth sounding, this is a genuine threat that requires action. And so the brain sounds it again, a little louder. The effort to fix the feeling is read by the brain as confirmation that the feeling was justified. Resistance becomes fuel. Or, as the cliche has it: What you resist, persists.
The tragedy is that people apply their competence in exactly the wrong place. They are told, and they believe, that anxiety is a problem to be solved, so they bring all their problem-solving energy to bear on it – and the harder they work, the more entrenched it becomes. The way out is not a better fixing technique. It is the recognition that this particular problem does not call for fixing at all.
Floating: a different relationship
To float is to stop feeding the loop. Not to fight the anxiety, not to fix it, but to change your whole relationship to it, so that it runs out of the one thing that keeps it turning: your resistance. The book describes this through four facets, which are not four techniques to be practised in sequence but four aspects of a single shift.
Awareness is the ground. It is not concentration or a special state to be attained through years of practice, but the simple field in which thoughts, feelings and sensations appear and fade. When you notice that an anxious thought is appearing ‘within’ awareness – that you are the space in which it occurs rather than the thought itself – its grip begins to loosen. The film is not the screen. A frightening film does not damage the screen it plays on.
Podcast guide here.
Acceptance is what happens on that ground of awareness. It is not approval and it is not resignation. It is the simple willingness to let an experience be present without immediately bracing against it. This is just what is happening now. The refusal of what is already here is the one labour guaranteed to exhaust you to no purpose, and setting it down – dropping what the book calls the second arrow, the struggle we add to the original difficulty – is where relief begins.
Podcast guide here.
Witnessing is attending closely to experience rather than being swept along by it. Looked at with interest instead of alarm, a wave of anxiety reveals itself as a collection of passing sensations, thoughts are urges of various kinds, held together only by the story that strings them into a single threat. Naming the pattern – recognising the Storyteller at work – lets you stand at a slight distance from a routine the brain has perfected.
Dissolution is what tends to happen when the loop is met this way. Not always, and never on demand: the moment dissolution becomes a goal, it becomes another fix, and the seeking sustains the very thing it hopes to end. But when an anxious experience is truly allowed, without the fixing agenda, the brain’s predictive machinery finds that the expected catastrophe does not arrive. The danger it forecast fails to materialise. The prediction is revised, and the loop, no longer fed, loses its charge.
Key: The four dimensions are not ‘steps’, they are different aspects of a single process.
The Journey Beyond Anxiety
I want to be clear about what this approach offers, because part of what makes it trustworthy is that it does not overclaim. Floating is not a cure that delivers permanent calm. The difficulties of life will still arrive, the brain will still sometimes sound its alarm, and there will be mornings when the old loop turns over. What changes is that you are no longer exhausting yourself in a war with your own mind. You feel the difficulty without adding the second arrow. Over time, the loops arise less often, grip less tightly, and release more readily.
There is no final arrival at which anxiety is abolished for ever – and, importantly, no need for one. The freedom on offer is not freedom from an unpredictable life, but freedom within it. You stop trying to fix your internal weather, and you float on by.
Listen to the podcast: Float: The Anxiety Podcast
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.