Anxious people may not believe it, but they have an abundance of energy. They may not believe it because they spend much of their time in a state of exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed. It feels to them that the world and its demands are too much for them, making them crave a simpler life where they can get away from things and just catch a breath.

The reason they feel so tired and overwhelmed is because of the amount of brain activity they endure every day. They think things out ten different ways, nervously anticipating outcomes, predicting other people’s feelings, and trying like crazy not to make mistakes. Someone once told me that people who do work using their brains are burning as much glucose as a construction worker every day. I don’t know where he got his research, but it has a ring of truth to it. Mental fatigue is a real experience, and nothing is more fatiguing than worry.

I like to think of it as an energy issue. We only have so much energy. We can use it for activity, creativity, libido, or worry. If we overdraw our energy account, everything must stop until we can build up more. But why would someone end up spending most of his or her energy on worry?

The answer lies in understanding where our energy comes from and how we naturally increase it over the course of a day. We increase it by seeking things that seem interesting, safe, and pleasurable. We may do that in a shy way or an extroverted way, but what raises energy is embracing good experiences. We are motivated to do so by our core feelings and impulses. Under ordinary circumstances, these core experiences arise naturally and authentically. As we acknowledge and express our feelings and impulses, our energy remains in a balanced, gently fluctuating state of well being. Even if we are in a crisis, our energy can remain good if we stay aware of what we are feeling and what we want.

But energy and initiative turn into anxiety if we repress our feelings so we do not upset someone we love. If this conflict between expressing feelings and pleasing others occurred too regularly in our childhood, there will be a disturbance in the person’s level of energy.

Under these conditions of living with caretakers who are reactive and easily disturbed, the child learns that his or her feelings and needs cause more trouble than they are worth. Anxious people figure out that there are family rules about who gets to express feelings and act freely, and that does not include them. As a result they constrict their natural self-expression, and all that good energy gets tied up in fighting against their own impulses. When the impulses try to sneak out anyway, anxiety ensues. Originally purposeful energy then becomes nonproductive static in the system. Unfortunately, we learn not only to hide our feelings from other people, we learn to hide them from ourselves. Now we are anxious and don’t even know why.

Any system, including the human organism, wears itself out when you tell it to go and stop at the same time. Instead of spontaneous feelings and impulses generating creative enjoyment, you get exhaustion and entropy, a winding down and oversimplification of the personality. Anxious people always have the feeling there is another personality inside them, one much more open and fun loving if only they could let it out.

Recovery from excessive anxiety is helped by techniques like yoga, meditation, and the conscious stopping of catastrophic thinking. Medications are a godsend for both the acutely and chronically anxious person. But when anxiety has gotten into the personality in a more long-lasting way, it is often important to figure out why and how the person learned to stifle his or her true feelings and impulses to such an extent. She needs to figure out who or what made her believe her safety or well being would be threatened by just being herself.

The recovery from a life of anxiety often entails sitting with and exploring the anxiety signal, rather than giving into it and withdrawing. As we learn to tolerate the experience of anxiety and to ask ourselves why this situation feels so dangerous, we can unravel that old learning back to its source. By tuning into the anxiety, we often see how irrational it is and begin to separate the past from the present. We begin to build a beachhead of reason against the irrational onslaught of childhood fear.

All of us can learn to comfort ourselves and not be held back by anxiety. We can go ahead and gently do those things that are good for us and our health, things which might have been squelched in our childhood family. We can learn to use anxiety as a signal that we are suppressing our feelings and thoughts and figure out what it is about this situation that is making us feel like a vulnerable child. We are adults now and have an adult’s mind. We are also lucky enough to live in a culture that supports and defends our right to expression.

Tuning into our feelings and needs is the first step. We don’t have to tell anyone, confront anyone, or take any action. Writing in a journal can be an easy first step toward improved self-awareness and self-acceptance. Once we are comfortable with our own feelings, we can begin in little ways to express ourselves among safe, supportive others. Anxiety transforms into good energy when we listen to ourselves and claim our right to have our own feelings and needs. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach.