Overcoming the Fear of Being Anxious

At the root of this fear is the often unknown belief that being or getting anxious is unacceptable. This often unconscious belief instructs your body to trigger anxiety whenever you think you’ll get anxious in the future¹.

There may have been a point in your life when you unknowingly decided that being anxious is dangerous or not ideal for you in some way. You may have made this conclusion to prove that you dislike and want to avoid ever being anxious. 

Overcoming the fear

The key to overcoming the fear of being anxious is to realize that, yes, you likely dislike being or getting anxious, but you don’t have to view being or getting anxious as unacceptable. You might hate getting anxious with every fiber of your body.

This point of view is critical because it can be easy to think that things we intensely hate or dislike are things we should be or get anxious about. We take the level of hate almost as a rationale or justification that the anxiety is called for and should exist.

If its difficult for you to accept that overcoming the fear of being anxious will require you to be ok with being or getting anxious, then you probably have 1 or more reasons (likely unconscious and unique to you) why you think being anxious is unacceptable. To address this, you will have to uncover these reasons so they are out in plain sight. Uncovering these reasons alone may dissolve the fear. In other cases, uncovering these reasons will reveal what happened to you (likely in the past) that led you to view being anxious as unacceptable.

You may, for example, find that you view the potential or actually being anxious as unacceptable as a reminder/evidence that you want to avoid being anxious. An example of someone with this view is here. If so, you will have to create a new strategy or approach for handling the thought, potential, or actuality of you being or getting anxious.

Instead of viewing being anxious as unacceptable, you can know you dislike it and focus your efforts on uncovering the root cause of your different anxiety triggers. We have solutions like How to Eliminate an Anxiety Trigger in the recommended reads section to help you with that.

Some reasons why you might have a fear of being anxious

1. Other people may call you something you don’t want to be called or labeled as (ex: weak, insecure, etc)
2. You may think that you aren’t allowed to be anxious to achieve your goals or be the type of person you want to be.
3. You may think being or getting anxios means something about you (you’re flawed, defective, broken, etc).

1. Why thinking something is unacceptable triggers anxiety ↩︎

Recommended reads for overcoming social anxiety

Looking for more?

If you’d like to dig deeper or want 1on1 help let us know. Otherwise, we suggest leaving a comment so our experts or someone in the community can help you.

Have something to add?

If you have insights to share or a question we’d love to hear it. Contribute