Why Trying to Make Anxiety Go Away Makes It Worse
Most people who struggle with anxiety believe the goal of treatment is to feel less anxious. To finally make the worry stop. To get rid of the racing thoughts, the tension, the dread. That makes intuitive sense. If something is uncomfortable, you want it to go away.
But the truth is, trying to make anxiety go away is often what keeps it in place. The harder you push against it, the more it pushes back. The more you try to suppress an anxious thought, the louder it becomes. The more you try to avoid an anxious feeling, the more your nervous system learns that the feeling is dangerous.
This post explains why fighting anxiety backfires, what your brain is actually doing when you feel anxious, and how an approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a different way of relating to anxiety entirely.
The Goal Is Not to Eliminate Anxiety
This is one of the hardest things to accept when you have been struggling with anxiety for a long time, but it is also one of the most freeing.
Anxiety is not the enemy. Anxiety is a built-in human response that helped your ancestors survive. Some level of anxiety will always be part of being alive.The goal of effective anxiety work is not to eliminate anxiety. It is to change your relationship with it so that anxiety stops running your life.
A successful outcome looks like still feeling anxious sometimes, but not being controlled by it. Being able to do the things that matter to you even when anxiety shows up. Having the tools to move through it rather than around it.
That is a different goal than "make anxiety go away," and it changes everything about how you approach treatment.
How Your Amygdala Works
Your amygdala is a small almond-shaped structure in your brain that acts as your threat detection system. When it senses danger, it triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response, flooding your body with stress hormones, sharpening your senses, and preparing you to act.
Here is the thing most people do not know about the amygdala. It does not have a "maybe in danger" setting. It functions essentially like an on/off switch. Either you are safe or you are not. There is no in-between.
This is by design. If a tiger jumped out of the bushes, your ancestors did not have time to weigh the evidence and consider whether the danger was real. The system had to be decisive. So when the amygdala fires, your whole body responds as if the threat is absolute.
The problem is that the modern world is full of things that trigger the amygdala without being actual life-or-death threats. A difficult email. A worried thought. A memory. A physical sensation. Your amygdala does not differentiate. It just sees danger and activates.
Understanding this is important because it explains why anxiety feels so absolute and overwhelming even when nothing is objectively wrong. Your brain is doing exactly what it is built to do.
Why Timing Matters with Coping Strategies
This is something I emphasize with most of my anxious clients. Coping strategies work best when you practice and use them before anxiety has fully escalated.
Once you are in full anxiety or panic mode, your body is flooded with cortisol and epinephrine. These stress hormones are doing their job, preparing you for survival, but they also temporarily reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, problem-solving, and accessing the strategies you have learned.
This is why "just take a deep breath" advice often feels useless to someone in the middle of a panic attack. The part of their brain that knows how to use breathing strategies has gone offline.
The skill is in noticing early signs of activation such as tension building in the body, thoughts racing, irritability rising, and then using your coping tools before it fully takes over. This is why coping strategies need to be practiced as skills rather than treated as switches you can flip in a crisis.
This also means that practicing when you are calm matters. Your nervous system is learning, and the more it practices regulation, the more accessible those skills become when you need them.
What Happens When We Try to Suppress Anxious Thoughts
A classic psychology study by Daniel Wegner demonstrated something important about thought suppression. Participants were told to spend a few minutes not thinking about a white bear. The result was the opposite of what they expected. People could not stop thinking about the white bear. The harder they tried to push the thought away, the more persistent it became.
Wegner called this ironic process theory. When we actively try to suppress a thought, two mental processes activate. One tries to push the thought away. The other monitors whether the thought has come back. That monitoring process keeps the thought alive in your mind, which means suppression actually increases the frequency and intensity of the very thought you are trying to avoid.
This is part of why anxiety is so hard to outsmart. The mental energy you spend trying not to think about something keeps that thing front and center in your awareness. The very effort of fighting the thought reinforces it.
This is different from behavioral avoidance, which I covered in Part 1 of this anxiety series. Behavioral avoidance is when you stop doing things or going places to avoid anxiety. Thought suppression is when you try to stop thinking certain things to avoid anxiety. Both maintain the cycle, but they do it in different ways.
The ACT Approach: A Different Relationship with Anxiety
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, was developed by psychologist Steven Hayes in the 1980s. It is an evidence-based therapy approach grounded in research on how the human mind works.
ACT takes a fundamentally different stance than traditional approaches that focus on eliminating or controlling difficult thoughts and feelings. Instead, ACT focuses on changing your relationship with internal experiences so they have less power over you.
The core idea is what ACT calls workability. Rather than asking whether a thought is true or false, you ask whether engaging with it in a particular way is workable. Does fighting this thought help you live the life you want? Does avoiding this feeling actually make it go away? Or is it making things worse?
For anxiety specifically, the ACT approach offers a way out of the exhausting cycle of trying to feel less anxious. You stop fighting the anxiety. You learn to make space for it. You take action toward what matters to you.
This is harder than it sounds. But it works precisely because it stops feeding the cycle.
Defusion: Creating Space Between You and Your Thoughts
One of the most useful concepts from ACT is defusion. Cognitive fusion is when you become so wrapped up in a thought that you experience it as reality itself. You are not just having the thought, you are inside it. The thought feels like the truth.
Defusion is the practice of stepping back so you can see a thought as a thought rather than as a fact.
The simplest defusion technique is to add a few words to whatever your mind is telling you.
Instead of "I am going to fail," try "I am having the thought that I am going to fail."
Instead of "Something is wrong with me," try "I am noticing the thought that something is wrong with me."
This creates a small but important gap between you and the thought. You become the observer of the thought rather than the thought itself.
Writing thoughts down can also help. Once an anxious thought is on paper, you can look at it from outside. You can ask whether it is workable, whether it is helpful, whether you want to give it your time. The thought stops feeling like a nagging best friend or backseat driver telling you what to do and starts feeling more like a passing weather pattern in your mind.
Practiced over time, defusion changes the felt experience of having anxious thoughts. They do not disappear. But they have less grip.
Acceptance Is Not Resignation
This is one of the most important things to understand about the ACT approach, because the word acceptance is often misunderstood.
Acceptance does not mean giving up. It does not mean liking what is happening. It does not mean settling for a life dominated by anxiety. It does not mean you cannot work toward feeling better.
Acceptance means acknowledging what is actually happening in the present moment without immediately trying to push it away. It means letting an anxious feeling be there long enough to actually feel it, rather than fighting it the second it appears.
The paradox is that genuine acceptance often reduces anxiety more than fighting it ever could. When you stop spending energy on the fight, the anxiety has less to push against. It tends to soften.
But that softening is a byproduct, not the goal. The goal is to be able to live your life, to do the things that matter to you, to move forward toward what you value, even when anxiety is along for the ride.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In practical terms, the ACT approach to anxiety might look like this.
You notice anxiety starting to rise. Instead of immediately trying to make it stop, you acknowledge it. "I am noticing anxiety in my chest right now."
You name the thoughts driving it without arguing with them. "I am having the thought that this will go badly."
You make space for the feeling rather than fighting it. You let it be there.
You ask yourself what action you want to take based on your values, not based on the anxiety. Maybe that is sending the email anyway. Maybe that is having the difficult conversation. Maybe that is staying present in the moment instead of escaping into your phone.
You proceed. Anxiety comes with you, but it is no longer driving.
Over time, with practice, this becomes more natural. Your nervous system learns that anxiety is not an emergency. Your brain stops treating anxious thoughts as commands. The cycle that has kept anxiety in charge starts to weaken.
When to Get Support
If you have been fighting anxiety for a long time, learning a different relationship with it is genuinely hard to do alone. The patterns are deeply grooved. The reflex to fight the feeling can be automatic before you even notice it happening.
This is where working with a therapist can help. We can practice these skills together, identify the specific patterns that have kept anxiety in charge for you, and build the foundation for a different way of moving through your life.
If you are dealing with anxiety and want to learn how to relate to it differently rather than just trying to make it go away, I would love to help. Reach out here to get started.
You can also read Part 1 of this anxiety series for an overview of how anxiety works, or Part 2 for a deeper look at coping strategies.
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Hayes, S. C., Levin, M. E., Plumb-Vilardaga, J., Villatte, J. L., & Pistorello, J. (2013). Acceptance and commitment therapy and contextual behavioral science: Examining the progress of a distinctive model of behavioral and cognitive therapy. Behavior Therapy, 44(2), 180–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2009.08.002
Wegner, D. M. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13.
