Why Fixing Your Anxiety Loop Is Making It Worse
Most people who come to see me about anxiety have already done a great deal of work on it. They can name their triggers, trace their patterns back to childhood, and identify the thoughts that set the whole thing off. They have journals, apps, breathing techniques, and a working vocabulary that most psychology undergraduates would envy.
They are also, almost invariably, exhausted.
Not from the anxiety itself – though that is tiresome enough. From the effort of managing the anxiety loop. From the relentless monitoring, the daily assessments, the cycle of implementing a new technique, watching for results, and arriving at the dispiriting conclusion that the thought factory is still running.
This is the trap that thirty-six years of clinical practice has taught me to recognise. And the clearest account of it begins, unexpectedly, with a zoologist in Sydney in the 1950s.
The Doctor Who Taught Her Patients to Float
Before training in medicine, Claire Weekes had established herself as one of the first women in Australia to earn a doctorate in zoology. She was accustomed to fieldwork: watching animals in their natural habitat, noting patterns before drawing conclusions.
In her consulting room she applied the same discipline. Patient after patient arrived with the same complaint: racing thoughts, palpitations, breathlessness, faintness, sweating, insomnia. Many had been told by their doctors to stop worrying and calm down, which they found, unsurprisingly, difficult to do. Others had been in therapy for months or years, examining the roots of their anxiety, challenging their thoughts, replacing one mental habit with another.
None of them were well.
Weekes noticed something her contemporaries had largely overlooked. The problem was not the anxiety itself. It was what her patients did in response to it. The checking, the bracing, the urgent attempt to manage the sensations – these were not solutions; they were fuel for the anxiety loop. Every time a patient struggled against the experience, the nervous system registered the struggle as confirmation that something dangerous was happening, and amplified accordingly.
Her conclusion was paradoxical enough to resist on first hearing. Do not fight the sensations. Do not attempt to calm them. Allow them to be present, and float on by.
Floating was her word for it. Not resignation, not endurance, not the kind of passive surrender that people sometimes read into the idea. Something more practical: to experience the sensations without bracing against them, without adding a second layer of alarm to the first. To let the nervous system do what it was doing without treating that as an emergency requiring your personal intervention.
Those who tried it began to report a change. The anxiety did not vanish on command – that was never the promise – but it rose, reached a peak, and subsided, provided it was not continuously fed by resistance. The symptoms, left to themselves, had a natural arc. The fight was what kept them circling.
Weekes published her findings in 1962 in her book Self Help For Your Nerves. More than sixty years later, they remain among the most clinically useful observations ever made about anxiety.
The Whack-a-Mole Problem
Here is the difficulty with most approaches to anxiety, and I speak from personal experience as someone who both experienced anxiety problems, and have trained in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
They work – at least in the short term, for the specific thought or pattern they are applied to. If you can identify an anxious thought, examine it, question its accuracy, and replace it with a more proportionate alternative, you can take the charge out of it. This is not nothing. For many people it is real and lasting help.
What it does not do is shut down the factory – the anxiety loop.
No sooner has one anxious thought been addressed than another arrives. The arcade game Whack-a-Mole comes to mind: hit one mole and another pops up from a different hole. You can earn impressive scores, but you cannot end the game.
The problem runs deeper than the individual thoughts. Each time you pick up the mallet and swing, you send a signal to the brain: there is something here that requires urgent attention. The brain – which is at its core a prediction machine, constantly generating forecasts about what is dangerous and what is not – takes careful note. It concludes that the thought was serious enough to demand a response, which means the next thought generated about similar territory will carry similar or greater weight.
This is not a flaw in CBT or in any of the other approaches that follow a similar logic. It is a flaw in the underlying strategy of treating anxious thoughts as problems to be solved. The thoughts are not the problem. The anxiety loop is the problem. And the loop is powered, in considerable part, by the attempt to fix it.
When the Solution Becomes the Problem
A client I saw some years ago illustrates this precisely. He was a software engineer in his late twenties with severe social anxiety. He had come to understand his difficulty with real precision: he knew about the adrenaline surge, the predictive mechanisms of the anxious brain, the specific thoughts that typically preceded a difficult social encounter. He had completed a course of CBT. He kept a thought log. He had practised conversation openers. He had read more books on anxiety than I had.
He was also stuck.
The preparation, he told me, made things worse. The more thoroughly he rehearsed, the more anxious he became about whether the rehearsal would hold. He had developed the habit of writing out paragraphs he might deliver at a social occasion, which he would then memorise and spend considerable time worrying about forgetting.
This is the logical endpoint of the fixing approach applied to anxiety: a life organised around the management of the problem, in which the management has become the problem. The monitoring, the checking, the constant inward attention, the measuring of progress against a baseline of how bad things currently are – all of this constitutes a continuous message to the threat system of the brain that something is wrong. And the brain, responsive as ever, obliges. Thus maintaining the anxiety loop.
What I suggested to him was something that sounded, by his own admission, absurd. We agreed he would visit a café and make a single remark to the barista. Four words, chosen together. Not a conversational gambit, not a social-skills exercise, not an opportunity to practise anything. Just four words, delivered, and then whatever happened would happen.
He came back the following week looking slightly puzzled. He had done it. The barista had replied. The anxiety had not disappeared – it had not been asked to. But the worry, as he put it, had not seemed so serious as before.
This was the beginning of a different orientation. Not waiting for the anxiety to recede before he could act, but discovering, on the far side of the attempt, that the anxious prediction had not come true.
What Floating Actually Means
The approach this suggests is not new, and it does not require years of therapy to arrive at. What it requires is a shift in the relationship to the experience – not trying to eliminate the anxiety but noticing it, allowing it to be present in awareness without treating it as a crisis demanding a response.
The neuroscience we have now supports this in a way that Weekes could not have anticipated. When you struggle against an anxious sensation, you feed the brain’s threat-prediction system information that confirms danger. When you allow the sensation to be present without adding a layer of alarm, you feed it different information, and the prediction is revised over time. The anxiety loop loses its fuel not by being defeated but by being met without the resistance that was sustaining it.
This is not the same as giving up. It is, more accurately, what becomes available when the energy spent fighting is freed for something else.
The clients who make the most progress are rarely those who find the best technique. They are the ones who arrive, usually after years of diligent effort, at the recognition that the techniques have become the trap. That understanding — simple in statement, hard-won in practice — is where a different way forward begins.
Claire Weekes called it floating. In my new book, Float. Exiting the Anxiety-Stress Loop, I call it exiting the anxiety loop. The destination is the same: the discovery that the anxiety you have been trying to defeat will, if left to itself, run its course and pass.
The factory does not need to be dismantled. It needs to be left alone.
This article is an excerpt from Dr John Eaton’s new book – Float. To be published on Amazon in August 2026.