Why Anxiety Is a Protective Response (And Why Forcing Calm Doesn't Work)

Anxiety can be – at best – overwhelming and inconvenient, and, at wort, completely debilitating. It’s easy to label anxiety as the problem when it seems to cause us so much discomfort and pain.

But one of the keys to healing anxiety is understanding what it really is.

Anxiety is not a malfunction or something that’s trying to hurt you — anxiety is a protective response created by the subconscious and nervous system.

I’ve been helping people heal from anxiety and a myriad of other physical and emotional upsets for over 8 years and one thing I know for sure is that healing is not “getting rid” of something that causes us discomfort.

It’s about alchemizing that discomfort into acceptance and safety.  

In this post, my goal is to help you understand what your anxiety really is, so that you can take steps to alchemize it.

This is the second post in a four-part series on healing anxiety at the root by working with the subconscious and nervous system.

 You can check out the first post here, where I explain anxiety is an emotional issues that cannot be “solve” by the conscious mind.

Anxiety Is a Protective Response (Not a Problem)

The first shift you need to make is going from seeing anxiety as the enemy to understanding anxiety is your ally.

Anxiety is not an unfair punishment — it’s a protective response built into our brains and nervous systems to keep us safe and alive.

In the last post, I compared your anxiety to a smoke detector. A smoke detector is designed to sound an alarm if it senses smoke. A properly working fire alarm will save your life if your house catches on fire.

Similarly, your limbic system and nervous system work together as your body’s threat detection system, creating anxiety when danger is perceived.

When they detect a threat, they sound the alarm in the form of anxiety (heart racing, tension, sweaty palms, surge of adrenaline, etc.). When you are in actual danger, this threat detection system can save your life.

However, if the smoke detector (or threat detection system) was created to detect the very slightest bit of smoke, for example, a candle being blow out, it would be going off at times when the house is not actually in danger of burning down.

This is not the case of a faulty smoke detector, bur rather highly sensitive programming.

Your threat detection system works the same way.

If your limbic system has been conditioned through chronic stress or trauma, subconscious anxiety can be triggered even when you’re safe.

It does this to try to protect you from the pain that you’ve experienced before.

How the Limbic System Creates Anxiety to Protect You

For example, if your parent abandoned you in your early life, your threat detection system may be wired to be highly sensitive to abandonment. That could mean that in relationships, you often feel anxious that your partner will leave if they “need space” after an argument, or seem emotionally walled up and closed off.

Your anxiety is trying to keep you safe from being abandoned again by giving you the fight-or-flight response to perceived danger. Ultimately, it’s trying to prevent the same kind of emotional pain that you’ve been through from happening again.

Without this understanding, your anxiety just feels like it’s making life harder, or holding you back, when in reality, it’s doing everything it can to keep you safe.

Why Anxiety Shows Up in Many Areas of Life (Safety Over Happiness)

You might wonder, how is it keeping me safe if it’s sabotaging my relationships and causing additional stress??

The answer is that survival and safety are more important to the brain than happiness.

Your limbic system’s main priority is safety. Safety above happiness, healthy relationships, success, and even health. Just like a smoke detector isn’t programmed to consider temperature, humidity or sunlight, it’s only job is to detect smoke.

If something has hurt you in the past, your brain has created an association to that thing and will do it’s best to avoid that pain again.

And because our threat detection system is so advanced, anything that even reminds us of that pain has also been logged as “dangerous”, and could trigger the alarms.

In our above example of abandonment, work could feel like a threat because the abandonment wound tells you that you can’t make it on your own. Therefor, any thoughts of losing your job or conflict in the workplace would cause your threat detection system to send the same danger signals.

You could feel a lot of anxiety or fear around your job performance, or your finances, or even in your relationships to co-workers or management. Essentially, the abandonment wound is causing your brain to see any indication of conflict or disapproval as an imminent threat to your safety.

All of this fear and tension causing long-term stress in the body could go on to affect your intestinal wall lining, leading to leaky gut. There is growing evidence that chronic stress and leaky gut are linked.

That chronic stress response triggers the ongoing release of hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine, which could weaken the intestinal wall lining, allowing toxins and bacteria to pass into the bloodstream.

With bacteria passing into the bloodstream, you could end up with a myriad of diagnosis, including IBS, acne, food sensitivities, or even autoimmune disease.

While this doesn’t mean anxiety directly causes illness, chronic stress and nervous system dysregulation are increasingly recognized as contributing factors to many physical conditions.

At first, it might be difficult to see a connection between your parent abandoning you as a child, and your anxious attachment style, financial stress, and gut issues, and yet they all stem from the same root.

RELATED: The Link Between Autoimmune & Nervous System Dysregulation (with Client Story)

Why Anxiety Is Triggered Even When You’re Safe

Due to the early life trauma when our limbic system and nervous system were developing, this pattern of fear creates a chronic hypervigilance.

With those patterns being strengthen day after day, year after year, your brain starts to see non-threatening things as dangerous, too.

Think about it like this. When you watch a scary movie, after the stress (movie) is over, you might find yourself feeling really jumpy.

Logically, you understand that there is no threats in your living room, yet the your heart still skips a beat when something creaks down the hall, or you notice a dark object behind your door (it’s your housecoat hanging).

Your rational mind knows that you’re safe, but your threat detection system is on high alert and responds to potential threats as if they are very real.  

The thing is, your threat detection system is using all the information you collect to assess your safety. Sounds, smells, facial cues, tone of voice, body language, touch, even taste (hello food sensitivities) all play a role in whether your brain perceives safety or danger.

And it’s filtering that information through a system that has been chronically sensitive and fearful. So it will often react to non-threatening situations as if they are truly dangerous, even if you logically understand that they are not.

How Hypnotherapy Heals Anxiety at the Root Level

Now, you could go through and address each of the ways anxiety show up separately, which is what most people do (and feel very overwhelmed by because they’re simultaneously trying to heal their relationship, money fears, connection to self, and dis-ease in the body), or you could get to the root and heal just one thing.

This root-cause approach to healing anxiety works at the subconscious level, rather than focusing only on surface-level symptoms.

In our abandonment example, it’s the abandonment itself.

By bringing safety in to the part of you that has long believed you are not safe, you turn down the hypervigilance your body has adapted to.

In hypnotherapy we are able to work with the part of you that feels fearful and abandoned, and create safety and acceptance from within.

Remember what I said in the beginning of this post about healing being less about “getting rid of” what makes us uncomfortable, and more about alchemizing that discomfort into safety and acceptance?

Well, this is what I mean.

It’s a truly magical to witness this level of healing in my clients.

The truth is, we can’t go back and change what happened to you. But we can go within and change what it means to you.

In hypnotherapy, we enter a trance state that allows direct access to the subconscious mind — where anxiety and safety patterns are stored.

While in trance, we are more open to new ways of understanding ourselves. We are also more able to connect with our deeper emotions and beliefs, making it easier to create change, and for that change to take hold more rapidly.

Often my clients come in with a lifetime of anxiety, and within 6 sessions, feel that weight lift.

When anxiety is understood as a protective response rather than a problem to eliminate, we can work with the body, and that’s where true healing becomes possible.

In the next post we’ll dive deeper into how we alchemize fear into safety with hypnotherapy. In the meantime, check out my Think & Feel Positive daily hypnosis to get a little taster of what hypnosis is like.

Katie is a board-certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Pain Reprocessing Therapist who helps people retrain their brains, calm their nervous systems, and heal chronic pain and anxiety naturally. She teaches somatic techniques, guided visualization, and hypnosis to reduce stress, inflammation, and anxiety, empowering clients to step into wellness, self-compassion, and lasting healing. Explore her signature brain retraining program, The Recovery Code  to start your journey toward recovery.