Why You Feel Anxious Even When Nothing Is Wrong
Therapy for anxiety in person in Wichita & online across Kansas
Anxiety Everywhere All The Time
You know you're safe, but your muscles won’t relax, your thoughts keep spinning, your brain keeps scanning for problems, you keep analyzing conversations, and your social algorithms keep adding fuel to the fire.
Sometimes anxiety has an obvious cause, but other times it’s just there, a houseguest that has overstayed its usefulness yet refuses to leave. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with you - why you can’t relax, why you can’t sit still, why you can’t enjoy good things without fretting about future pitfalls - you’re not alone. This is exactly how anxiety manifests for some people: a seemingly irrational alarm system that won’t turn off. It’s like a smoke detector that noticed your burnt toast but keeps screaming like there’s a whole fire in the house.
Anxiety, like an alarm you absolutely can’t drown out
Anxiety: An Alarm That Won’t Turn Off
Anxiety is extremely adaptive. Without it, the human race might have gone extinct from poisonous mushrooms, prowling lions, and forgotten curling irons a long time ago. Remembering what went wrong, scanning the environment for danger, sending you notifications of what needs to be addressed: anxiety keeps you and your loved ones alive. It’s protective.
The problem is that the brain doesn’t always distinguish between “something dangerous is happening right now” and “someday, something might go wrong.” This can lead to your heart racing over a text you can’t quite discern the tone of, over a loved one getting home later than you expected, or over a stomachache you weren’t anticipating. Most of the time, those situations turn out to be innocuous, but the anxiety smoke detector has already gone off.
Particularly if you have experienced trauma, the brain can decide to err on the side of alarming. Better safe than sorry, it says! And since you’re still alive despite all the scares - the anxiety must be working, so let’s have even more of it! Even though the dangers aren’t real right now, your body’s response is.
When “Nothing Is Wrong” Feels Fake
If you’ve lived through a significant, shocking trauma, or through a series of prolonged traumas, your body had to kick into high gear to help you survive. Bodies are good at surviving! But sometimes, they’re not as good at returning to thriving. Once you’ve experienced the loss of safety, it’s not always easy to get that sense back.
If it feels like you were tricked by a false illusion of safety before, even in good times your brain may now be scanning, scanning, scanning: waiting for the other shoe to drop again. Or, if you used to live in a home where you had to adapt your behavior to someone else’s moods, your brain may still be carrying that old pattern of vigilantly watching everyone around you. Safety now, doesn’t mean your brain feels safe enough to relax. It already learned the lesson that constant alertness is how it can best keep you alive.
If trauma - whether a big event or a series of smaller situations - is part of your history, trauma therapies like CBT, EMDR, and somatic work can help you distinguish between the past when you needed the anxiety to survive, and the present, where it’s okay to sometimes relax into safety.
Anxiety: so distressing that you both feel it and search for how to extinguish it
Anxiety’s Search for Certainty
One of the traps of anxiety is that the strategies often usen to feel safer can actually keep it fueled up. Seeking reassurance, researching that stomachache, ruminating on conversations, and triple checking the front door - all of these behaviors can provide temporary relief but long-term reinforcement of the anxiety. Soothing anxiety with excessive reassurance and certainty, can teach your brain: double checking makes anxiety better so double checking is now necessary. Next time, double checking is the baseline, and triple checking is the new horizon it will reach for. Less obvious behaviors like scrolling social media for information on risks you hadn’t even thought of, can also function this way: make sure you learn everything you might need to know…. and now your brain knows that scrolling social media can tell you about risks you hadn’t been prepared for, so you better keep doing it!
Searching for certainty does not have to be the solution to anxiety though, and therapy can help you build new patterns.
Anxiety: Sometimes It’s Just Good Intuition!
But sometimes, chronic anxiety is not a signal that you’re alarming over nothing. Sometimes, anxiety is a signal that your intuition has noticed something your brain doesn’t want to look at or doesn’t know how to solve. It’s very common for individuals in abusive relationships, harmful homes, stressful work environments and rejecting communities, to feel chronic high anxiety. Irritability, restless tension, and keeping nonstop busy may be a signal that your brain is just hyperactive after trauma, or it may be a signal that you’re in the middle of some kind of risk that you don’t feel empowered to escape.
Therapy can be helpful for distinguishing these two options, and one of the ways to begin is with mindfulness. Tracing your experience with curiosity (What happened right before, during and after? What sensations are part of it? What memories pop up when you focus on those sensations?) across time can bring clarity to whether it’s actually a false alarm, or whether your body has been trying to tell you something important all along.
Anxiety isn’t always wrong.
Imagine being able to relax like you’re at a campfire, without any alarms going off!
Therapy for Anxiety in Wichita, KS
The goal of anxiety treatment is not to eliminate every anxious feeling: anxiety is a functional part of being human. Instead, we’ll focus on discerning when it’s giving you good intel versus when it is just spiraling in response to past experiences and patterns. When you better know what’s happening, then you know what to do with it. Depending on your needs, therapy may include a kind of CBT, somatic work, EMDR, or other approaches. Together we’ll work to address both the thoughts that fuel anxiety and the physical patterns that keep you revved up and unable to relax.
If you’re in Kansas, feeling plagued by anxiety that won’t chill out and looking for help, read more about me here and schedule your free consultation here. If you regularly feel anxious when nothing seems to be wrong, there may be a reason your mind and body are having difficulty standing down. Understanding what’s happening is a good place to start.
Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, painful relationships, spiritual harm, and trauma.