What If You Stopped Fighting Your Anxiety?
What If You Stopped Fighting Your Anxiety?
Most of the advice about anxiety is built around the same basic idea: manage it, reduce it, get it under control. And there's value in that. Coping strategies matter. Breathing techniques matter. But they only get us so far.
What I want to offer you here is a different framework — one that has changed how I relate to my own anxiety, and that I've watched change things for the people I work with.
What if your anxiety isn't the enemy?
The part that's trying to help
There's a therapeutic framework called Internal Family Systems (check out the therapist and researcher Richard Schwartz) built on a simple idea: we are not one single unified self. We are made up of many different parts, each with their own perspective, their own fears, their own ways of trying to protect us. This sounds weird but just start to listen to people talk about their problems and very quickly you’ll hear things like, “on one hand” they think this… “and on the other hand” they think this. We are always split in how we think about certain people, situations, potentialities. IFS builds on this reality.
And here's a fundamental: every single one of those parts has a positive intention. Even when its behaviour is hard to live with.
Schwartz has a phrase — all parts are welcome. All of them. Including the anxious one. Including the one that races and ruminates and won't let you sleep.
Because that part has a job that it’s playing. It's working hard to prevent something painful from happening. It's scanning ahead, preparing, making sure you're not caught off guard. It's trying to help you.
When we can see that — when we can genuinely see our anxiety as a protector rather than a problem — something starts to change.
What befriending actually looks like
I want to be clear about what this isn't. Befriending your anxious part isn't agreeing with everything it does. It isn't saying yes, worry more, catastrophize more, that's great. It's not spiritual bypassing or unhealthy positivity.
It's more like what a good parent does with a frightened child. Coming close. Getting curious. Saying: I see you. I hear you. What's going on?
Think about a moment in your own life when you were really struggling — and someone came alongside you, not with advice, not with "pull yourself together," but with genuine understanding. That makes sense. Of course you feel that way.
Something happens in those moments. Something relaxes. Relief.
That is the quality we're trying to bring to our own internal experience. That same settling.
The part that does the welcoming
In IFS, there's a distinction between parts and what Schwartz calls the Self. The Self isn't a part. It's the calm, grounded core of who you are — the part that was there before the anxiety developed, before the protective strategies formed.
Schwartz describes the Self through eight qualities: curiosity, calm, clarity, connectedness, confidence, courage, creativity, and compassion.
Let’s let four of them breathe:
Curiosity — not analysis, not judgment. Just genuine open wondering. Hm. What is that?
Calm — not the absence of emotion, but a settled groundedness (is this a word?) underneath whatever is happening.
Courage — the willingness to turn toward difficult things rather than away from them.
And compassion — bringing care to your struggle, rather than fighting it, shutting it down, or wishing it would just disappear.
What IFS calls being Self-led is this: responding to your anxious part from this calm, grounded place — rather than from inside the anxiety itself.
Why fighting it doesn't work
Here's an image that I keep coming back to: a balloon being pushed underwater. If you push it down, it pops up somewhere else. The anxiety doesn't disappear — it just moves. It shows up differently, usually at a worse moment, usually with more force. Your addiction, emotional distance, procrastination. All evidence that something like this may be happening.
This is why avoidance, distraction, and suppression tend to be short term solutions. They work for a while. Until they don't.
And this is also why the research points us in a counterintuitive direction: focusing awareness on the physical sensations of anxiety — a fluttering in the chest, a tightening in the stomach — and breathing through it, with curiosity and without judgment, can actually decrease it. Not because we've conquered it. But because we've stopped treating it like the enemy.
A question to sit with
Your anxiety has been working overtime — maybe for years — to protect you from something. There are reasons it does what it does. And somewhere underneath its busyness, it has something it wants you to know.
A question worth sitting with, gently: what might your anxious part be afraid would happen if it stopped?
Because the goal here isn't to eliminate anxiety. It's to stop being at war with it — and to start getting curious about what it's actually trying to say.
That shift, in my experience, is where the real change begins.