The harder you fight it, the worse it gets

If you've ever been told to "just relax" or "stop worrying," you already know how useless that advice is. Not because you haven't tried — you've probably tried harder than anyone around you realises. Breathing apps, affirmations, distraction, white-knuckled willpower at three in the morning. And the anxiety keeps coming back anyway. Often it feels like the harder you push against it, the bigger it gets.

That's not you failing. That's anxiety doing exactly what anxiety does. There's a real, physical reason fighting it makes it worse, and once you see how it works, your whole relationship to it can start to change.

A lot of the people who come to see me in Kyneton — and online, across Australia and further afield — arrive worn out from years of arm-wrestling their own nervous system. Some have been at it for decades. And almost without exception, the thing that finally shifts isn't a better technique. It's the day they stop fighting and start listening.

The paradox of pushing against it

There's an old paradox in psychology: the more you try to suppress a thought or a feeling, the more insistently it comes back. The researchers call it "ironic process theory" (Wegner, 1994), but you don't need the term for something you've already lived. Try not thinking about a white bear for the next thirty seconds. You'll think of nothing else.

Anxiety runs on the same logic. It shows up, and you push back — clenching against it, arguing it down, ordering yourself to calm the hell down — and your brain reads that pushing as proof that something really is wrong. Why else would you be fighting this hard?

So your nervous system does the one thing it's built to do: it turns the alarm up. More adrenaline. Faster heart. Breath gone shallow and high in the chest. Shoulders climbing toward your ears. The very system you're trying to settle takes your resistance as the signal to escalate.

Your nervous system is doing precisely what a few million years of evolution shaped it to do. The trouble is that these days the alarm gets tripped by things that won't actually kill you — a curt email, a room full of people, an uncertain future, a memory you thought you'd left behind — and once it's going, struggling with it gives it nowhere to land.

What's going on in your nervous system

It helps to know a little of what's happening under the bonnet. You'll have heard of "fight or flight" — that's your sympathetic nervous system firing up, readying your body to take on the threat or bolt from it. There's a third response that gets less airtime: freeze. When the threat feels too big to fight or flee, the system pulls the plug instead, and you're left numb, far away, stuck to the spot. Fight, flight and freeze sit at the centre of Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 1994) and the somatic trauma work of Peter Levine (Levine, 1997).

None of these are decisions. They fire automatically, well below thinking. The body has already moved before the mind catches up. That's why you can know, flatly, that you're safe and still feel your heart slamming, your palms wet, your gut in a knot. The thinking part of the brain — the prefrontal cortex — gets overridden by the older survival machinery (the amygdala, the brainstem) that doesn't wait for permission.

So when you try to think your way out of anxiety — reasoning with it, debating it, willing it to stop — you're asking the prefrontal cortex to overrule a system built to go around it. It's like talking calmly to a smoke alarm. The alarm doesn't care how reasonable you are. It cares about the smoke.

This is why working only with thoughts can take some people a certain distance and then stall. CBT and similar approaches are genuinely useful, and for plenty of people they're enough. But when anxiety lives in the body more than the mind, it needs to be met where it actually is — in the nervous system, not the argument.

The exhaustion cycle

What I see in the room, over and over, is people caught in a loop that runs roughly like this:

1. Anxiety rises — the body sensations, the racing thoughts, that dropping sense of dread.
2. You push back. You clench, you distract, you power through, you tell yourself to stop being so ridiculous.
3. The system reads the pushing as danger and turns the alarm up.
4. So you push harder — more effort, more will, more quiet fury at yourself for not having beaten this yet.
5. Eventually you crash, into numbness or exhaustion or a flat freeze.
6. You come back up a little. And it starts over.

This loop is brutal, and it's expensive. It burns through your energy and your confidence and slowly your sense of who you are. Left running long enough it can tip into depression, because the constant fight leaves nothing in the tank. You start steering around situations, drawing your life in smaller to dodge the triggers. You start half-believing something in you is fundamentally broken.

Nothing in you is broken. Your nervous system has worn a groove into a pattern and hasn't yet found the way out. And nervous systems are not fixed — they can learn a different shape, they can settle. The way out just doesn't run through more fighting.

What it actually needs

If fighting makes it worse, what's left? The answer can feel back-to-front the first time you hear it: your nervous system needs to feel safe enough to let go. Worth sitting with for a second, because it cuts against everything the struggle has taught you. The system can't be forced into calm — it can only be made safe enough to find its way there itself.

This is where somatic anxiety therapy comes in, and why I keep returning to it. We don't start with your thoughts; we start with your body. We notice what's actually here — the shoulders up around the ears, the band across the chest, the breath gone thin, the jaw set hard. We don't go at these sensations to fix them. We just turn toward them, with curiosity instead of judgement.

And something shifts when you meet anxiety with attention rather than a fight. The system starts to clock that there's no lion in the room. The alarm has no reason to climb, because nobody's wrestling it. Slowly — sometimes very slowly — the charge begins to drain out.

This isn't ignoring the anxiety or pretending it away. It's a change in your relationship to it. The thing you've been locked in combat with becomes, instead, something you can turn toward, listen to, and let soften.

Working with it, not against it

I work somatically and relationally, leaning on attachment theory and whatever else the person in front of me needs. In plain terms, here's what that tends to look like:

We slow down. Anxiety wants everything fast. So in a session we go deliberately slow, and let some space open up. That's not me being passive — slowing down is itself the message to your nervous system that there's no emergency right now, that it's safe to come down off high alert.

We stay with the body. Instead of getting pulled into the story — the what-ifs, the worst-case reels — we turn to what's happening physically. Where do you feel it? What's it like? Hot or cold, tight or buzzy, holding still or moving? Paying attention this way lights up different wiring than spinning in worry does, and it settles the system from the inside.

We find anchors. In somatic work a "resource" is anything that helps your system settle — a memory, a sensation, a spot in the body that feels steady, even just the weight of your feet on the floor. We build these together, so you've got something to come back to when anxiety rises and I'm not in the room.

We go underneath, when you're ready. Anxiety rarely turns up on its own. Often it's threaded back through earlier things — how you learned to attach as a kid, grief that never got to move, experiences that were too much to take in at the time. As your system steadies, we can move toward those deeper layers — not to manage the symptom, but to let the thing underneath it actually change.

Small shifts, real change

I'll be straight with you: this isn't a quick fix. There's no single technique that clears anxiety overnight, and anyone selling you that is having you on. What I can say is that the shifts, when they come, tend to hold.

It usually starts small. A few minutes of quiet someone hasn't felt in years. A night slept through after months of three-a.m. ceilings. Catching yourself halfway down the spiral and finding you can stop, breathe, feel your feet on the floor. Those moments stack up. The system starts to trust that it can come down. The window widens. Anxiety doesn't vanish — it's a normal human feeling, it's not meant to — but it stops running the show.

What changes most is how you are with yourself. Instead of being at war with your own body and mind, something more like company grows up between you and them. You start to trust you can meet a hard moment without it ending you. You stop reading yourself as broken and begin to notice the sheer doggedness that's carried you this far.

Another way through

If you've been fighting anxiety for a long time and you're flattened by it, the exhaustion makes complete sense. You've been pouring everything into a thing that was never going to work — not because you got it wrong, but because fighting your own nervous system is arm-wrestling yourself. Whoever wins, you lose.

So try something else. Not giving up — pointing the same energy somewhere it can actually do something. Stop fighting the anxiety long enough to get curious about it. Learn the language your nervous system is speaking, and what it's been asking for all along: to feel safe.

This is the work I do, week in week out, in my room in Kyneton, with people in Bendigo, and online across Australia or further afield. It's quiet, unhurried work, and it moves at your pace, not mine.

If any of this lands, I offer a free 15-minute call — a chance to talk through what's going on for you and get a feel for whether working together is right.

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