Demystifying Anxiety Part 1: What Is Anxiety — Language, the Brain and Why We Feel It
🍃 Language matters
Anxiety is a word I hear almost every day. Almost every client who walks into my room has used it at some point: “I am anxious.” And while that may seem like a simple statement, there is something important happening in that phrasing.
I am anxious can quickly become I AM anxiety. It starts to sound like something you are - rather than something you are experiencing. A small shift can create a big difference:
→ “I am feeling anxious.”
→ or even, “My mind is anxious.” This is one of my favourite reframes.
Because it gently separates you from the experience. It reminds you that anxiety is not your identity - it is a state. And states change.
Language plays a powerful role here. The way we speak about our inner experience shapes how we relate to it.
When we say, “I am anxious,” we merge with it.
When we say, “I am feeling anxious,” we create space.
And in that space, something important happens: we can begin to work with it. We can observe it, understand it, and respond to it — rather than becoming it. Words matter.
🍃 The brain has its reasons
From a biological perspective, anxiety is the body’s natural response to stress, pressure, or emotional load. When we go through ongoing stress, the body releases hormones like cortisol, activating the nervous system.
In simple terms, your body is doing what it is designed to do — respond and protect.
This response is linked to the sympathetic nervous system, your internal alarm system. When it switches on, the body moves into protection mode, preparing you to act, escape, or defend - known as the fight or flight response.
But not all threats are physical.
Experiences like uncertainty about the future, pressure at work, conflict in relationships, or unresolved past wounds can also be registered by the brain as “unsafe.” The body does not always distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress - it responds to the intensity of what you are going through.
So what you may be feeling is not weakness, but activation.
🍃 Redefining Anxiety
This perspective is echoed by Daniel Amen in his book ‘The End of Mental Illness’, where he encourages us to understand anxiety through a brain health lens rather than as a “mental health” label. The shift moves from:
“Something is wrong with me”
to
“Something is happening in my brain” … often as a response to stress, overwhelm, or lived experiences.
This way of seeing it can gently move us away from self-blame and toward understanding how the brain and nervous system work. It invites us to relate to anxiety not as a flaw or fixed identity, but as a process.
In this view, anxiety is not who you are.
It is something your nervous system is doing — often in an attempt to protect you.
And when we begin to understand it this way, it becomes less personal… and the question softly shifts from:
“How do I get rid of this?”
to
“What might my body be responding to… and what does it need right now?”
In the next post, I’ll explore this further… What might anxiety actually be trying to tell us?
→ Demystifying Anxiety (Part 2): Why We Feel Anxious - When the Mind and Heart Don’t Align
