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Idaho, Iowa, Des Moines
Almost everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. It’s a normal emotional response to situations that can be stressful. For some people, anxiety is an occasional nuisance– something that comes up before or during a big work presentation, a date, or a big life change. However, other people experience anxiety constantly. If you’re like many of my clients, you may struggle with regular anxiety that can feel impossible to shake.
If you’ve dealt with chronic anxiety for a long time, you know how frustrating and damaging it can feel in everyday life. These days it seems like everyone has an answer or quick fix for anxiety. From medication to mindfulness, the streams of advice seem endless. But what if the gobs of well-intentioned advice haven’t helped you? What if you’ve tried your best to get rid of your anxiety, and it’s still stubbornly sticking around?
As an anxiety therapist and coach, I understand how maddening it can be to search for answers that don’t work. While everyone is different and experiences anxiety differently, my work with clients brings up a lot of notable patterns. Here, learn about the impacts of chronic anxiety on your nervous system, and three reasons why your anxiety might not be going away.
When you spend your days stressed and anxious, your brain responds by cracking down on its fight or flight response. This means that your body pumps out tons of stress chemicals like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. The purpose of this is to keep you in a state of hypervigilance, a heightened state of alertness in the face of danger.
Evolutionarily speaking, hypervigilance is great. Anxiety and hypervigilance kept humans from being eaten or maimed when we were prey animals and had to fight off threatening intruders. But as you’ve probably heard, your brain can’t tell the difference between immediate threat of death and, say, your boss continuing to pile more work onto your plate. Your brain responds in the same way: “This is a threat! Launch every counterattack in the arsenal in response!”
Your brain is simply trying to protect you and keep you alert for imminent threats, but a keyed-up nervous system can be really tough to dial down. Chronic hypervigilance keeps you in a cycle of anxiety. Over time, if you don’t have the support and safety you need to dial down your anxiety, it can continue to get worse and worse.
Anxiety can cause:
Chronic anxiety can quite literally rewire your brain. You become stuck in a cycle of hyperarousal, and often end up avoiding people, environments, or situations that might rev up your worries. This avoidance response is natural and human. The problem is that avoiding situations that might provoke your anxiety can lead to everything feeling scarier and more anxiety-inducing. That’s why if you’ve struggled with anxiety for a long time, you might have noticed your life has shrunk down to a tiny pinprick compared to what it was pre-anxiety.
No matter how hard you try to dial down your anxiety, it won’t work if you’re under chronic stress.
Things like…
…are all examples of chronic stressors that can perpetuate your anxiety cycles.
If you’re prone to anxiety in the first place, chronic stress stokes the fire and keeps you stuck in “fight or flight” mode. Essentially, your anxiety is a bonfire, and chronic stressors like these are the fuel. In order to put the fire out, you have to stop feeding the flames.
One of the most fundamental (and frustrating) truths about mental health is that your beliefs shape your experiences. This is great if your beliefs are accurate, helpful, and self-compassionate. But if you have anxiety, the things you believe about yourself and the world are likely anything but.
Many of my clients grew up feeling invalidated or misunderstood by their families and the world at large. This can lead to feeling unequipped to deal with and underresourced in adulthood. And if you’re neurodivergent, the messages you received throughout your life were probably that you were lazy, unintelligent, different (in a bad way), spacey, too sensitive, or “too much.” If this is you, I see you.
As an adult, those messages can solidify into beliefs like, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m too stupid,” “the world is too hard and scary,” or “I’ll never be able to [fill in the blank].”
It’s understandable to hold beliefs like this when you’ve dealt with a lifetime of anxiety and feelings of not belonging. However, when you hold beliefs like this, they seep into your life and create your reality. You’ve probably heard of confirmation bias. Essentially, when you believe something is true, you’re more likely to look for evidence to support that belief, which strengthens it even more.
For example, if you secretly worry you’re stupid, you’re more likely to be extremely sensitive to criticism (or perceived criticism) and hard on yourself every time you make a mistake. If you believe there’s something inherently wrong with you at your core, you’re more likely to struggle with feeling lonely, disconnected, and depressed. Your beliefs about yourself and the world will always be reflected back in the way you engage with other people, your job, and yourself.
It’s only natural to try to protect yourself by developing various coping mechanisms, habits, and strategies. Sometimes these are completely unconscious, but they still drive your behaviors and emotions. Unfortunately, these survival skills often backfire in adulthood, ultimately leading to even more stress and anxiety.
These can include things like:
These habits may certainly have helped you get by in childhood. Many people with anxiety or ADHD were forced to learn to mask their struggles or feelings of inadequacy through a veneer of perfectionism, people-pleasing, and other coping strategies. But if you’re here reading this, you probably already know: these habits can only get you so far in life before they trap you.
Sadly, many people’s everyday lives and routines involve navigating constant stressors. That’s a fact of life for many adults living in our society. Plus unraveling lifelong beliefs and habits – and learning new ones – is hard work, and takes time and practice. But I’m here to tell you that no matter what your life looks like, it is possible to dial down your levels of hypervigilance and anxiety.
If you want support in feeling calmer, more balanced, and more resilient in the face of stress, I’m here to help. I offer individualized anxiety therapy and coaching to help people get unstuck from chronic anxiety patterns.
Together, we can uncover the beliefs that are holding you back, learn coping skills that actually help you cope, and find better balance in a life that feels overwhelming and stressful.
Learn more about my therapy services (including EMDR and talk therapy) if you’re located in Idaho, Iowa, or South Carolina. For all other locations, check out my coaching services. My coaching program offers all the same expertise, tools, and guidance as therapy in a more direct and goal-oriented approach that you can benefit from anywhere.
Reach out today to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation. Let’s start building a better future together.
Danielle is an anxiety therapist and perfectionism coach. She specializes in helping busy millennials dial down their anxiety and ADHD, so they can perform at their best. Danielle has been featured on Apartment Therapy, SparkPeople, Lifewire, and Now Art World. When Danielle isn't helping her clients, she's playing video games or spending time with her partner and step children.
Helping millennial professionals dial down anxiety and stress, so they can perform at their best.
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