The Key to Overcoming Anxiety Most People Miss: Addressing Anxiety About Anxiety

What is anxiety about anxiety?

Anxiety does not always come from an external situation. Sometimes the trigger is internal: the anticipation of how anxious you might become.

Clinically, this overlaps with what is often called anxiety sensitivity: fear of anxiety-related sensations because they are interpreted as dangerous, unbearable, embarrassing, or proof that something is wrong. In plain language, it means becoming anxious about the experience of anxiety itself.

The nervous system starts treating its own stress response as a threat. That activates more stress response. The added stress feels even more threatening. The cycle feeds itself.

I often see this pattern with people who have been managing anxiety for a long time. The anxiety does not just arrive on its own. It arrives with a layer of dread around it: the dread of feeling it again, the dread of not being able to function, the dread that this time it will not pass.

That dread is not irrational. It comes from experience. If anxiety has scared you before, it makes sense that you would start fearing its return. But that fear is also part of what keeps the cycle going.

Anxiety about anxiety can look like:

Feeling nervous at a social event, not because of the event itself, but because you are afraid of getting anxious while you are there
Worrying about going to work, not only because of the workload, but because you are anticipating the anxiety you might feel
Worrying about having a panic attack in public, which makes you more anxious and more likely to panic
Lying awake at night anxious that you will not fall asleep because you are so worried about being anxious
Waking up tired and immediately worrying that your anxiety will be worse today because you did not sleep well

If you want to understand more about what stress and anxiety do in the body and brain, you may also find it helpful to read The Effects of Stress and Anxiety on the Brain.

Why your coping strategies keep hitting a wall

Here is the thing most advice about anxiety does not say clearly enough: the same techniques that help with ordinary anxiety can stop working when anxiety about anxiety is running underneath.

You try meditation, but you spend the whole time monitoring whether you are calm enough. You do breathing exercises, but you become anxious about whether they are working. You try to stay present, but part of you is already scanning for how anxious you might feel in the next situation.

The technique is not the problem. The relationship to the anxiety is.

When the anxiety response itself becomes something to fear, the nervous system stays on alert even when there is no obvious external threat. You are not only anxious about the meeting, the social event, the drive, the phone call, the night ahead, or the workday. You are anxious about what might happen inside you when you get there.

This is why addressing anxiety about anxiety is often the missing step. It is not about learning a brand-new trick. It is about changing the relationship to the experience.

You may also find it helpful to read Stop Overthinking: How to Trust Yourself and Feel More at Peace.

How to break the cycle of anxiety about anxiety

The steps below are not about eliminating anxiety. They are about changing how you relate to it, which is what reduces the cycle over time.

Step 1: Notice what is happening

The first step is simply recognizing the pattern in the moment.

Not only later, when you are thinking back on what happened. Not only in therapy. In the moment itself.

The noticing sounds something like:

I am anxious about being anxious right now.

That recognition matters more than it sounds. Anxiety about anxiety operates partly through its invisibility. When you can name it, it becomes something you can work with rather than something that is simply running you.

For example:

I am not only anxious about the meeting. I am anxious about what it would feel like to be anxious at the meeting.

Or:

I am not only worried I will not sleep. I am worried about how anxious I will feel if I do not sleep.

That small shift gives you a little distance from the loop. You are no longer fully inside it. You are observing it.

Step 2: Shift from threat to observation

The next step is changing what you do with the recognition.

Most people, when they notice anxiety arriving, immediately try to make it leave. They resist it, distract from it, brace against it, argue with it, or monitor it closely to see whether it is getting worse. The bracing is part of what amplifies the cycle.

The shift is from:

I must not feel this.

To:

I am noticing this.

That may sound subtle, but it matters. When anxiety is treated as a threat, the nervous system receives the message that something dangerous is happening. When anxiety is treated as an uncomfortable internal experience that can be observed, the system has less reason to escalate.

This does not make the feeling disappear instantly. That is not the point. The point is that you stop adding fear on top of fear.

Step 3: Accept the presence of anxiety, not its permanence

Acceptance in this context does not mean liking anxiety, wanting it, or deciding that it is fine. It means releasing the belief that feeling anxious is dangerous or unacceptable.

Anxiety is uncomfortable. It can be miserable. But the physical sensations themselves, the racing heart, tight chest, shallow breath, heat, trembling, stomach drop, are not usually harmful. They are the nervous system doing what it was designed to do.

What often becomes harmful is the secondary layer: the belief that these sensations mean something catastrophic, that you cannot handle them, or that you cannot function while they are present.

Anxiety about anxiety lives in that belief.

Acceptance sounds less like “I am calm now” and more like:

This is anxiety. I do not like it, but I know what it is.

Or:

This feeling can be here without deciding what happens next.

Or:

I have felt this before, and it has passed before.

Acceptance-based approaches, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and mindfulness-based interventions, have a strong evidence base for anxiety disorders. The goal is not to erase discomfort, but to reduce the struggle with discomfort so it no longer controls the whole system.

Step 4: Stay present rather than catastrophizing the next moment

A significant part of anxiety about anxiety lives in anticipation.

The next meeting. The next social event. The next night. The next time your chest tightens. The next moment you might not be able to control. The anxiety pulls you into a future that has not happened yet and then asks your body to react as if it is already happening.

Grounding can help here, not because it magically removes anxiety, but because it interrupts the forward projection and returns attention to what is actually here.

What is under your feet?
What can you see?
What sounds are in the room?
What is happening right now, not five minutes from now, not tomorrow, not in the worst-case version of the future?

The anxious nervous system is often dealing with an imagined future. The present moment is usually more manageable than the one anxiety is predicting.

Step 5: Stop trying to force it away

This is the most counterintuitive part: the more urgently you try to push anxiety away, the more signal you may send to the nervous system that something is wrong.

The anxiety response is triggered by perceived threat. If you are urgently fighting the anxiety, part of your system may read that urgency as confirmation that the threat is real.

Resistance amplifies.

What helps is allowing the sensation to be present without escalating it with resistance, monitoring, or catastrophe. This is not passive. It is an active practice of staying with something uncomfortable without adding to it.

A practical way to say this is:

I do not need to like this. I do not need to make it disappear this second. I can let my body move through it.

That is very different from resignation. You are not giving up. You are removing the extra fear that kept the loop alive.

A note on what is underneath

Sometimes persistent anxiety about anxiety has deeper roots than the cycle itself.

For some people, the nervous system learned to stay on high alert in a childhood environment that required vigilance. For others, anxiety became linked to a relationship, a season of life, a panic episode, a betrayal, a loss, or a period where the body genuinely did not feel safe.

In those cases, the steps above can help, but they often work better alongside understanding what trained the nervous system to stay so vigilant in the first place.

That is where therapy becomes useful, not as a last resort, but as a more direct route to the source.

What changes when you stop fearing anxiety

When the fear of anxiety begins to loosen, something shifts.

Not the absence of anxiety. Anxiety is part of being human, and it does not disappear forever. But the relationship to it changes. The dread softens. The cycle slows. And the techniques that did not work before, the breathing, the mindfulness, the grounding, can start to reach something because they are no longer being used as weapons against a feeling your nervous system is treating as a threat.

That is the shift.

Not overcoming anxiety so it never returns. Learning to move through it without the secondary layer of fear that kept it running.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between anxiety and anxiety about anxiety?

Anxiety is a response to a perceived threat: a situation, a worry, a pressure, or an uncertainty. Anxiety about anxiety is the nervous system treating its own anxiety response as the threat. It is the fear of feeling anxious, rather than the fear of one specific situation.

The two often travel together, but they need to be addressed differently.

Why does breathing or mindfulness not always help?

Because when anxiety about anxiety is running underneath, even calming techniques can become objects of anxious monitoring. You try to breathe slowly, then worry about whether it is working. You try to meditate, then judge whether you are calm enough.

The technique is not the problem. The relationship to the anxiety is. Addressing that relationship directly is what allows the techniques to actually land.

Can you have anxiety about anxiety without realizing it?

Yes, and it is very common. It often looks like avoiding things not because of the situation itself, but because of what you fear you might feel there.

It can also look like exhaustion, not only from anxiety episodes themselves, but from constantly watching for when the next one will arrive.

Is this the same as panic disorder?

It overlaps. Panic disorder involves fear of panic attacks and often fear of the panic response itself, which is one specific form of anxiety about anxiety. But anxiety about anxiety does not require panic attacks.

It can show up as general dread around ordinary situations, fear of not coping, or a background hum of anticipatory anxiety that never fully settles.

When does this need professional support?

Consider seeking support when the cycle has been going on long enough that managing it on your own is exhausting, when it is affecting your sleep, relationships, or functioning, or when you have tried the approaches above and the relief is short-lived.

Anxiety about anxiety often has layers underneath it, sometimes related to earlier experiences, panic episodes, relational stress, or chronic vigilance. Those layers are often easier to reach with support than alone.

References

Tolin, D. F., Abramowitz, J. S., & Stevens, S. K. (2020). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders: A comprehensive review of evidence and practice. Clinical Psychology Review, 82, 101938. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101938

Haller, H., Breilmann, P., Schröter, M., Dobos, G., & Cramer, H. (2021). A systematic review and meta-analysis of acceptance- and mindfulness-based interventions for DSM-5 anxiety disorders. Scientific Reports, 11, 20385. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99882-w

This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.

If you are in crisis or require immediate assistance, please call 911 or visit your local Emergency Department, or call or text Canada’s Suicide Crisis Helpline at 9-8-8.

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