From nervousness to power: Unveiling the silver lining of anxiety

Explore how anxiety can motivate and uncover hidden emotional insights with practical strategies.

Chitra, a theatre actor, has always been anxious.
When she was five, she worried that her parents wouldn’t return home as she waved goodbye to them, snug in her grandmother’s arms. She bit her fingernails until they returned. As she grew, her coping skills evolved, including lying to impress her school friends when she was 13 and, later, as she became an adult, going for long walks alone to clear her mind.
I sit down to write this because I know anxiety is one of the most common experiences we have as human beings. While it can be a natural reaction to occasional stressful events, it is a constant state for some of us, like Chitra.
Anxiety’s impacts are far-reaching. It interrupts sleep, disrupts life goals, and impedes relationships, which compounds the effects of isolation and worry, causing most people to believe their lives would be better if their worries, fears, and insecurities completely vanished. Many of us think anxiety is a version of fear. While fear may indeed be present, anxiety is more complicated. In reality, anxiety wants us to proceed through life with caution. After all, it is only when anxious thoughts impede our lives that we look closely at why. So, it might be surprising to hear that feeling anxious or nervous can sometimes be beneficial.

Why Anxiety Can be Beneficial Sometimes

When you start feeling anxious or nervous, it’s natural to want to retreat, find an escape, or do something to make those feelings disappear. Anxiety is uncomfortable—your stomach churns, you start to sweat and tremble, and your breathing becomes quick and shallow. Your body signals something is wrong, urging you to fight or flee. But when we do that, we miss out on the information and motivation contained within anxiety, Dr Dennis-Tiwary explains in her book Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad). Anxiety has a few functions that can be helpful, and we may be able to soften it a little bit and find out what it’s trying to teach us. It serves a purpose: it prepares you to handle challenges, offers valuable insights into your emotions, keeps you alert, and can even enhance your performance in certain situations.
Pay attention to your anxiety—not for the apparent message it’s sending, but for what it might be diverting your focus from. It could hold some valuable insights.
Anxiety often manifests in a very mental way. For Chitra, her thoughts spiralled out of control, and she could feel the energy building in her hands, head, stomach, and chest. These overwhelming sensations demanded her full attention and made it feel like a survival response. Anxiety signals that there’s something urgent we need to focus on, something our mind insists we must figure out, or else our system feels like we could be in serious danger.

Reframing anxiety as excitement and using relaxation techniques can help you harness its benefits without letting it overwhelm you.

What Is Underneath the Anxiety?

However, all that intense energy might distract us, diverting our attention from something deeper. This could be fear, but it might also be anger, grief, or another core emotion. If our system perceives these emotions as unsafe or unresolved, it might trigger anxiety to keep us trapped in spiralling thoughts, preventing us from confronting those more intimidating feelings.
Take anger, for instance. Its role is to alert us that our needs aren’t being met, our boundaries are being crossed, or an injustice needs to be addressed. If your system believes that expressing anger won’t help meet your needs, protect your boundaries, or even put you in danger, it might channel your focus into anxiety instead. If you grew up in an environment where expressing emotions was unsafe or ineffective, you might have learned early on that accessing deep emotions doesn’t serve you. In such cases, anxiety can become a strategy to keep those emotions at a distance.
With time, Chitra learned that it’s easier to discover what sits beneath the anxiety by enlisting a compassionate friend or therapist rather than trying to do it by herself. She understood that it helps to remind the system that it’s okay to feel an emotion and that we don’t have to do anything about what we feel until and unless we’re sure it’s safe to do so.

Anxiety, like Depression, is also Dissociative

Anxiety and depression are closely linked in how they function—both are dissociative states that keep us from fully feeling deeper emotions. Both trap us in a constant sense of emotional unease. Anxiety pushes us toward the fight-or-flight responses, while depression leans us toward freeze-or-collapse. The nervous system is dysregulated and stuck in survival mode in either scenario.
However, anxiety carries energy and movement. It can even be functional in a world that values constant activity over stillness and slowness. For many, anxiety drives them to excel at work, pushing them to work harder, strive for more, and never settle.
Anxiety often comes with a nagging sense of inadequacy, a feeling that you’re not good enough and must keep working harder to earn love, belonging, or even survival. Depression, on the other hand, tends to manifest as helplessness or hopelessness—feeling inadequate but believing that no amount of effort will change anything. Despite its challenges, anxiety can sometimes feel more empowering than depression, even though the core experience of both is strikingly similar.

Anxiety, like depression, is a dissociative state, but with energy and movement that can sometimes drive us to excel.

Decoding Anxiety: Unveiling Its Hidden Insights

One key thing to understand about anxiety is that it uses our thoughts as a vehicle. Anxiety begins as a feeling in the body, and the brain quickly jumps in, often filling the gaps with old core beliefs—like the fear of not being good enough or the expectation of failure. The thoughts that accompany anxiety may or may not reflect reality.
Anxiety emerges because the nervous system perceives a threat, whether it’s real or imagined. Something feels out of balance, but it can be challenging to determine whether the cause is internal or external, rooted in the past or the present. However, if we can slow down and approach our anxiety with curiosity, we might uncover what it’s genuinely signalling. Beneath its smoke and mirrors, valuable insights may be waiting to be discovered.
Although anxiety is undeniably uncomfortable, it, like every emotional state we experience, serves a purpose and carries meaning. Instead of taking your anxiety at face value, listen to it for what it might be trying to divert your attention from. It could have some hidden wisdom to offer.

How to Harness the Benefits of Anxiety

Consider how your anxiety might motivate you to succeed in certain areas of your life. For example, it might push you to put extra effort into work or personal tasks, strive to make a good impression or drive you toward achieving your goals. When reflecting on your own anxiety, think about how you can channel it to fuel your growth and self-improvement. Here are some strategies that can help:
Reframe Anxiety: Sometimes, simply shifting your perspective can make a difference. Instead of labeling it as “anxiety,” try viewing it as anticipation. This reframe can help you approach challenges with a more positive mindset.
Practice Relaxation Techniques: How you manage your anxiety significantly influences its impact. Experiment with relaxation methods to calm your mind and body to prevent feeling overwhelmed. Deep breathing is particularly effective as it triggers the body’s relaxation response. Remember, too, that relaxation is a first step before meditation on the thoughts that emerge from relaxation. These thoughts may then give insights into the cause of anxiety, which will be very therapeutic, especially when the exercise is done with a therapist/counsellor or coach.
Face It, Don’t Avoid It: Avoiding anxiety-inducing situations can make anxiety worse over time. Instead, confront those challenges head-on, even if they make you nervous. Rely on the relaxation techniques you’ve practiced and remind yourself that anxiety is temporary.

Anxiety Isn’t Always a Bad Thing

Some anxiety and nervousness can be beneficial—they help you stay alert, prepare you to handle threats, and motivate you to keep pushing toward your goals. However, when anxiety becomes overwhelming, it can lead to distress and make it difficult to function effectively. So, when anxiety manifests as eustress (or “good stress”), it can enhance your motivation and drive. Additionally, anxiety serves as a signal, alerting you to areas that may need your attention. However, finding the right balance is critical to harnessing anxiety’s positive aspects without letting it take over your life.
Chitra, now in her forties, acknowledges that anxiety is something she manages regularly. Through care, practice, and effective strategies, she’s learning to keep her anxiety close while also taking the necessary space from it.

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