More Than Worry: What Anxiety Is Really Telling You
The biology, the soul, and the deeper message beneath the noise.
You've probably heard it before. Maybe from someone who loves you, maybe from that relentless voice in your own head: just stop worrying. Just relax. Just calm down.
And if you could — you would. Obviously.
But what if the more important question isn't how do I make this stop — but what is this trying to tell me?
That shift is everything. And it's where I want to start.
Anxiety Is the Wound of Our Times
Counselor and depth psychologist Sheryl Paul opens The Wisdom of Anxiety with a line that has stayed with me: anxiety, she writes, is one of the wounds of our times. Not a flaw. Not a failure. A wound — and like all wounds, it carries information.
An estimated 19.1% of U.S. adults experience an anxiety disorder in any given year, and 31.1% will experience one at some point in their lives. In 2024, 43% of U.S. adults said they feel more anxious than the previous year — up from 37% in 2023.
We are, collectively, an anxious culture. And our collective response has largely been to treat that anxiety as a malfunction — something to medicate, manage, or muscle through.
What if that's the wrong frame entirely?
What Anxiety Actually Is
Anxiety is your brain's alarm system doing its job — just often at the wrong volume, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time.
When your brain perceives a threat — real or imagined, present or remembered — it activates your nervous system in milliseconds. Heart rate climbs. Muscles tighten. Breath changes. Everything gets redirected toward survival.
This is the fight, flight, or freeze response. It's ancient, and it's wise. But anxiety disorders involve an overactive threat-detection system — the brain's alarm stuck in "better safe than sorry" mode, treating potential threats as real ones.
Research shows that the brain structures governing defensive responses are largely designed to bypass rational thought — which is why the subjective experience of anxiety and the body's threat response operate through different neural pathways. In other words: you cannot think your way out of a nervous system response. Telling someone to "calm down" is like asking them to reason with a smoke alarm.
But here's where the depth psychology lens opens something the neuroscience alone doesn't: the alarm going off isn't the whole story. It's pointing to something. And that something is worth turning toward.
Anxiety as Messenger
Sheryl Paul, writing in the Jungian tradition, offers a reframe that I find both clinically grounded and deeply true: anxiety is a messenger from the unconscious.
Not a malfunction. Not evidence of brokenness. A signal — one that, when we stop long enough to listen, can point us toward what in us most needs attention.
She writes that anxiety is like a distress flare. When we respond to it with shame, numbing, or the urgent need to make it stop, we miss what it's trying to say. But when we meet it with curiosity — what are you pointing to? what are you protecting me from? what have I been avoiding? — it becomes a doorway.
This doesn't mean wallowing in anxiety or deciding your nervous system knows best about every perceived threat. It means pausing before the reflex to shut it down, and asking a different question.
Depth-oriented therapist and author Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, offers a complementary frame: he suggests that much of the restlessness, insecurity, and unnamed unease so many people carry is, at its root, a loss of soul — a disconnection from depth, from meaning, from the inner life. The anxiety, in this view, isn't random. It's the soul's way of making itself heard when everything else has been too loud, too busy, too surface-level to notice.
What Anxiety Can Look Like
Because anxiety isn't always what we expect. It doesn't always arrive as panic or a racing heart. Sometimes it's quieter — and easier to explain away as just being a worrier, or Type A, or "stressed."
Anxiety might show up as:
A low hum of dread you can't quite name
Replaying conversations long after they're over
Physical symptoms — tight chest, tension headaches, stomach issues, broken sleep
Difficulty making decisions, even small ones
A need to control everything, because control feels like safety
Snapping at the people you love when you're already running on empty
Avoiding things that feel too big to face
Boredom that tips into restlessness — a longing for something you can't quite identify
That last one is worth naming. Paul writes that anxiety can arise from boredom and longing — from a soul that wants more depth, more meaning, more honest living than the life it's currently in. Sometimes anxiety isn't telling you something is wrong. It's telling you something is missing.
Why It Often Runs Deeper Than "Stress"
Sometimes anxiety has a clear and present cause. But often it has roots that reach much further back.
Stressful experiences during early development can lead to sustained changes in the body's stress response systems that extend into adulthood, increasing vulnerability to anxiety — underscoring the long-term impact of early experiences on mental health.
In other words: if you grew up in an environment where vigilance was the appropriate response — where things were unpredictable, overwhelming, or unsafe — your nervous system got very good at staying alert. It was protecting you. It learned that the world required constant watching.
The painful thing is that those patterns often outlive the circumstances that created them. Your body is still scanning, still bracing — even when there's nothing to brace for.
And underneath that vigilance, there's almost always something else. Grief. An unmet need. An old wound that never quite got tended to. An unlived version of yourself that never had the space to breathe.
Anxiety, as Moore might put it, is rarely just anxiety. It's a surface expression of something the soul is carrying.
So What Actually Helps?
I want to be honest: there's no quick fix. But there are ways of working with anxiety that go deeper than coping strategies — and they share something in common. They treat the anxiety as meaningful, not just manageable.
Regulation first. Before anything else, your nervous system needs to know it's safe. Breathwork, grounding, movement, and somatic practices aren't just techniques — they're ways of communicating safety in a language the body actually understands.
Getting curious, not combative. Rather than fighting anxiety or white-knuckling through it, what happens when you turn toward it? When you ask — gently, honestly — what are you trying to tell me? what am I not looking at? Paul's framework invites this kind of inquiry across four realms: body, thoughts, feelings, and soul. The answer will be different for everyone. But the question itself is often where healing begins.
Addressing the roots. If your anxiety has deep roots in early experience, attachment wounds, or unprocessed grief, managing the surface will only take you so far. This is where approaches like EMDR, parts work, and depth-oriented therapy can reach something that coping skills alone cannot.
The relationship itself. Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, tells us that co-regulation — the calming presence of one regulated nervous system on another — is neurobiologically foundational. Feelings of safety form the neural platform from which healing becomes possible. A good therapeutic relationship offers your nervous system something it may never have fully received: the experience of being genuinely safe with another person. Over time, that becomes something you can carry on your own.
Anxiety Isn't the Enemy
If anxiety has been your constant companion, I want to offer you a reframe — not to minimize what you're going through, but because I genuinely believe it's true:
Your anxiety is not evidence that you're broken. It's evidence of a sensitive heart, an attentive psyche, and an inner world that is working hard to get your attention.
You don't have to make it stop at any cost. You don't have to be ashamed of it. You don't have to manage it alone forever.
What would it be like to get curious about it instead — to ask what it's been trying to say?
This is the work I show up for every day — not just teaching coping skills, but helping people actually hear what their anxiety has been trying to say. If you're ready to listen together, I'd love to connect. Book a free 20-minute consultation below.
References
Koss, K. J., & Gunnar, M. R. (2018). Annual research review: Early adversity, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis, and child psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(4), 327–346. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12784
LeDoux, J. E., & Pine, D. S. (2016). Using neuroscience to help understand fear and anxiety: A two-system framework. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(11), 1083–1093. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16030353
Merkouris, E., et al. (2025). Molecular basis of anxiety: A comprehensive review of 2014–2024 clinical and preclinical studies. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 26(11), 5417. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms26115417
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. HarperCollins.
Moore, T. (2004). Dark nights of the soul: A guide to finding your way through life's ordeals. Gotham Books.
National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Any anxiety disorder. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder
Paul, S. (2019). The wisdom of anxiety: How worry and intrusive thoughts are gifts to help you heal. Sounds True.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
American Psychiatric Association. (2024). Annual mental health poll. https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/annual-poll-adults-express-increasing-anxiousness
