Why Anxiety Gets Worse When You Try to Fight It

If you've ever been told to "just relax" or "stop worrying," you already know how unhelpful that advice is. Not because you haven't tried. You've probably tried harder than anyone around you realises. You've tried deep breathing apps, positive affirmations, distraction techniques, and sheer willpower. And yet the anxiety keeps coming back. Sometimes it feels like the harder you push against it, the stronger it becomes.

Here's the thing I want you to know: that's not a personal failure. That's actually how anxiety works. There is a real, physiological reason why fighting anxiety makes it worse, and understanding this can be the beginning of a very different relationship with what you're experiencing.

In my practice as an integrative psychotherapist in Kyneton and Melbourne, I work with people every week who arrive exhausted from battling their own nervous systems. They've been fighting anxiety for years, sometimes decades. And almost always, the turning point comes when they stop fighting and start listening.

The Paradox of Resistance

There's a well-known paradox in psychology: the more you try to suppress a thought or feeling, the more intensely it returns. Researchers call this "ironic process theory," but you don't need a fancy name for something you've probably experienced firsthand. Try not thinking about a white bear for the next thirty seconds. You'll think about it more than you would have otherwise.

Anxiety works the same way. When anxiety shows up and you respond with resistance -- clenching against it, trying to argue it away, forcing yourself to calm down -- your brain interprets that resistance as confirmation that something is genuinely wrong. After all, why would you be fighting so hard if there weren't real danger?

So your nervous system does what it's designed to do: it escalates the alarm. More adrenaline. More cortisol. Faster heartbeat. Shallower breathing. Tighter muscles. The very system you're trying to calm down receives your resistance as a signal to ramp up.

This is not a design flaw. Your nervous system is doing exactly what millions of years of evolution built it to do. The problem is that in the modern world, this alarm system gets triggered by things that aren't actually life-threatening -- a difficult email, a social situation, an uncertain future, a memory from childhood -- and once triggered, it doesn't have a natural off-switch if we keep engaging with it through struggle.

What's Actually Happening in Your Nervous System

To understand why fighting anxiety backfires, it helps to understand a little about how your nervous system operates. You've probably heard of the "fight or flight" response. This is your sympathetic nervous system activating -- preparing your body to either confront a threat or run from it. There's also a third response that gets less attention: freeze. When the threat feels too overwhelming to fight or flee from, your system shuts down, leaving you feeling numb, disconnected, or stuck.

These responses -- fight, flight, and freeze -- are not choices. They happen automatically, below the level of conscious thought. Your body decides before your mind has even caught up. That's why you can know logically that you're safe and still feel your heart pounding, your palms sweating, your stomach churning. The rational part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) is essentially overridden by the survival part (the amygdala and brainstem).

When you try to think your way out of anxiety -- when you reason with it, argue with it, or use willpower to suppress it -- you're asking your prefrontal cortex to override a system that is specifically designed to bypass it. It's like trying to stop a fire alarm by talking to it calmly. The alarm doesn't care about your logic. It cares about the smoke.

This is why traditional approaches that focus only on thoughts and cognition often fall short for people with persistent, body-based anxiety. The anxiety doesn't live primarily in your thoughts. It lives in your nervous system. And it needs to be met there.

The Exhaustion Cycle

What I see in my Kyneton therapy practice, again and again, is people caught in an exhaustion cycle. It looks something like this:

1. Anxiety rises -- physical sensations, racing thoughts, a sense of dread.
2. You resist it -- you clench, distract, push through, tell yourself to stop being ridiculous.
3. The anxiety escalates -- your nervous system interprets the resistance as danger.
4. You resist harder -- more effort, more willpower, more frustration with yourself.
5. Eventually you crash -- into numbness, exhaustion, despair, or a freeze state.
6. You recover slightly, and the cycle begins again.

This cycle is brutal. It eats through your energy, your confidence, your sense of self. Over time, it can lead to depression, because the constant battle leaves you depleted. You might start avoiding situations, shrinking your life to reduce the triggers. You might start believing that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

But nothing is fundamentally wrong with you. Your nervous system is just stuck in a pattern, and it hasn't yet found a way out. The good news is that nervous systems can change. They can learn new patterns. They can settle. But the path to that settling is not through more fighting.

What Your Nervous System Actually Needs

If fighting anxiety makes it worse, what's the alternative? The answer might seem counterintuitive, but it's grounded in decades of neuroscience and somatic psychology research: your nervous system needs to feel safe enough to let go.

Let me say that again, because it's important. Your nervous system doesn't need to be forced into calm. It needs to feel safe enough to arrive there on its own.

This is where somatic approaches to anxiety therapy come in, and why I find them so effective in my work. Instead of starting with your thoughts, we start with your body. We notice what's happening -- the tension in your shoulders, the tightness in your chest, the shallow breathing, the clenched jaw. We don't try to fix these sensations. We simply notice them, with curiosity rather than judgment.

Something remarkable happens when you turn toward anxiety with gentle awareness rather than resistance. The nervous system begins to register that you're not in immediate danger. The alarm doesn't need to escalate, because you're not fighting it. Slowly -- sometimes very slowly -- the activation begins to settle.

This is not about ignoring anxiety or pretending it isn't there. It's about changing your relationship with it. Instead of anxiety being the enemy you're locked in combat with, it becomes a signal you can listen to, understand, and gradually soften.

Working With Anxiety, Not Against It

In my practice, I draw on somatic psychotherapy, attachment theory, and integrative approaches to help people develop a fundamentally different relationship with anxiety. Here's what that looks like in practical terms:

We slow down. Anxiety wants to speed everything up. In our sessions, we deliberately slow the pace. We create space. This isn't about being passive -- it's about giving your nervous system the message that there is no emergency right now, that it's safe to come out of high alert.

We track body sensations. Rather than getting caught in the story of anxiety (the "what ifs," the catastrophic predictions), we pay attention to what's happening in your body. Where do you feel the anxiety? What quality does it have? Is it hot or cold, tight or buzzy, moving or still? This kind of mindful body awareness activates different neural pathways than anxious rumination, and it helps regulate the nervous system from the inside out.

We find resources. A "resource" in somatic work is anything that helps your nervous system settle -- a memory, a sensation, a place in your body that feels calm, even your awareness of your feet on the ground. We build these resources together, so you have anchors you can return to when anxiety rises outside of sessions.

We explore what's underneath. Anxiety rarely exists in isolation. Often it's connected to earlier experiences -- attachment patterns from childhood, unprocessed grief, experiences that were too overwhelming to fully integrate at the time. As your nervous system stabilises, we can gently explore these deeper layers, allowing genuine healing rather than just symptom management.

Small Shifts, Real Change

I want to be honest with you: this is not a quick fix. There is no magic technique that will eliminate anxiety overnight, and anyone who promises that is not being truthful. What I can tell you is that the shifts, when they come, are real and lasting.

People I work with start noticing small things first. A moment of calm they haven't felt in years. Sleeping through the night for the first time in months. Catching themselves mid-spiral and being able to pause, take a breath, and feel their feet on the ground. Over time, these small moments accumulate. The nervous system begins to trust that it can settle. The window of tolerance widens. Anxiety doesn't disappear entirely -- it's a natural human emotion, after all -- but it stops running the show.

What changes most profoundly is the relationship with yourself. Instead of being at war with your own body and mind, you develop a kind of inner companionship. You learn to trust your own capacity to meet difficult moments. You stop seeing yourself as broken and start recognising the incredible resilience that has carried you this far.

A Different Way Forward

If you've been fighting anxiety for a long time and you're exhausted, I want you to know that the exhaustion makes sense. You've been working incredibly hard at something that was never going to work -- not because of any failure on your part, but because fighting your nervous system is like arm-wrestling yourself. Both sides lose.

The invitation is to try something different. Not to give up, but to redirect your energy. To stop fighting anxiety and start understanding it. To learn the language of your nervous system and discover what it actually needs to feel safe.

This is the work I do every day in my therapy room in Kyneton, with clients in Melbourne, and online in Australia or internationally. It's quiet, steady work. It honours your pace and your story. And it changes lives -- not through dramatic breakthroughs, but through the gradual, profound settling of a nervous system that finally feels safe enough to let go.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to have a conversation with you. I offer a free 15-minute discovery call where we can talk about what you're experiencing and explore whether working together feels right. No pressure, no obligation -- just a genuine human conversation about what's possible for you.

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