Why Do I Feel Anxious?

I often get asked, why do I feel anxious?  In my work as an anxiety therapist in Ely, this is one of the most common questions people ask when they first come for support.

Someone will be sitting in my office for a free initial consultation or at their first hypnotherapy session. They’ll tell me about their racing, negative thoughts and how they always think the worst. They’ll tell me about the fast breathing, heart palpitations, sweating and other physical symptoms of anxiety. And they’ll then tell me that they don’t know why they feel anxious.

Often life is good and there is not an actual, factual reason for the anxiety. It’s frustrating. The same old thoughts and feelings going around and around. You know you don’t have anything to feel anxious about but it still happens. You may have spent hour after hour racking your brain to try and understand why you feel the way you do.

Logically there is probably no reason for you to feel anxious. Sometimes someone has experienced something, after which they started struggling with anxiety. In those sort of cases we can point to what started it.

Yet, for most people, the anxiety sort of starts and you don’t realise it is a problem until it is already a problem. Then you are stuck with the same habitual pattern of anxious thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. Your brain is seeking to keep you safe but is overprotecting you because you already know there is no threat. This is where hypnotherapy can help. You can take back control over what is going on inside of your own head. You can start to feel more calm, confident and in control.

 

Quick Summary

Many people ask themselves: “Why do I feel anxious when nothing is actually wrong?”

In this article you’ll discover:

• why anxiety can happen without an obvious cause
• why your brain keeps searching for threats
• why looking for the cause doesn’t always solve anxiety
• how anxiety becomes a habit of thoughts, feelings and behaviours
• why changing today’s patterns is usually more helpful than analysing the past

Feeling anxious doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong with you. More often, it means your brain has become stuck in an overprotective pattern.

 

Related Resources

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Understanding Anxiety in Ely
• Physical Anxiety Symptoms
• Why Anxiety Isn’t Going Away On Its Own
• Anxiety and Overthinking
• Hypnotherapy Reviews in Ely

 

Why Do I Feel Anxious for No Reason?

Many people feel anxious even when there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason. Anxiety often develops as a pattern of thinking and feeling where the brain becomes focused on potential threats. Over time the mind and body can become used to reacting this way, which means anxious thoughts and physical sensations continue even when there is no real danger.

If you are experiencing anxiety in Ely, it can sometimes feel confusing when anxious thoughts and feelings appear without an obvious cause.

 

One Thing I Learned About Anxiety

One thing I remember from my own anxiety was constantly trying to work out why I felt anxious.

I assumed that if I could just find the reason or root cause, then the anxiety would disappear.

I would spend hours analysing what had happened that day, replaying conversations or wondering whether something from years earlier was causing the problem. I would go over and over all the negative events from my life searching for an answer.

The strange thing was that even if I thought I’d found a possible answer, I still felt anxious.

Eventually I realised something important.

Understanding what originally started anxiety wasn’t nearly as important as understanding what was keeping it going today. Going over the past just made me feel worse and I could never know exactly what started anxiety, I could only guess anyway.

Once I learnt how anxiety actually worked, and how to interrupt the patterns of thoughts and feelings now, everything gradually became much easier moving forward.

 

Why Looking For The Cause Doesn’t Always Help

Your anxiety may have started a long time ago, perhaps even in childhood. At that time you only had limited knowledge and experience of the world. Something may have been seen or heard that starts the process off. You could spend a long time going back over the past trying to find the cause. However, you can’t undo everything you have learnt and experienced since so you can never truly put yourself back there.

Even if you believed you’d discovered the original cause of your anxiety, it wouldn’t change the anxious thoughts and feelings you’re experiencing today. Those habitual patterns would still continue unless something changed how you responded to them.

For other people, a build up of stress and worry from multiple things may have built up to a sort of psychological tipping point. Your brain may then associate the anxiety with whatever happened around the time you first noticed it. Everything that went before can be forgotten, yet the anxious pattern has developed. Again, even if you thought you knew what had contributed to your anxiety starting, it wouldn’t change anything now.

That’s why, through hypnotherapy, we take a look at what you do now. We delve into your anxious thoughts, feelings and behaviours as they are happening now so that we can work together to help you to change that habitual pattern. You can move from what you do and how you do it, to something that is all about being calm, confident and in control. When you are getting on with things how you want to in your life, why you used to feel the way you used to feel becomes redundant. When you are feeling good and getting on with life, you will be looking forwards and not backwards.

Anxiety can also create a range of physical anxiety symptoms, such as racing thoughts, a tight chest, dizziness or difficulty relaxing.

Why you feel anxious now is not really about some event in your past. You feel anxious because of your patterns of thinking and feeling that you (inadvertently) developed at some point in your life. As creatures of habit, your anxious thoughts and feelings continue to repeat. Your brain constantly searches for whatever the threat is that is making you anxious. It always finds something for you to feel anxious about. Your anxiety drives your imagination. And your imagination starts to scare you even more. You can even feel anxious that you might feel anxious.

 

Why Anxiety Feels So Automatic

One of the reasons anxiety can feel so confusing is that it often seems to happen automatically.

You don’t decide to feel anxious. You don’t wake up in the morning and choose to overthink, imagine the worst or feel on edge. Instead, your brain has learnt a habitual way of responding.

Perhaps you notice a physical sensation such as your heart beating a little faster. Or maybe a thought pops into your mind.

Your brain immediately starts searching for danger.

• “What if something’s wrong?”
• “What if I can’t cope?”
• “What if this gets worse?”

You start to catastrophise and expect the worst. Those thoughts naturally create anxious feelings. And those anxious feelings then make the thoughts seem even more believable.

Before long, you’re caught in the familiar cycle of anxious thoughts, anxious feelings and anxious behaviours. Your mind tends to sort your thoughts according to how you feel. If you feel anxious, it will almost always find something to worry about.

The more often this happens, the more automatic it becomes. That’s why anxiety can sometimes seem to appear “out of nowhere”, even when life is actually going well.

The encouraging thing is that habits can be changed.

Just as your brain learnt this anxious pattern, it can also learn calmer, healthier ways of responding.

Instead of being thrown from one anxious thought and feeling to the next, you can learn how to interrupt the pattern, calm your nervous system and take back control over your own thoughts and emotions.

 

The Good News

One of the most encouraging things I see is how quickly people begin understanding anxiety differently once they recognise these patterns.

You don’t have to spend years searching for the perfect explanation.

Instead, you can begin changing how you respond to anxious thoughts and feelings today.

As those patterns change, anxiety often loses much of its influence.

Instead of wondering why you’re anxious, you become increasingly confident in your ability to manage your own thoughts and feelings.

Many people are surprised by how quickly things begin changing once they stop trying to solve anxiety and start changing the patterns that keep it going.

 

Frequently Asked Questions About Anxiety

Why do I feel anxious even when nothing is wrong?

Anxiety often develops as a pattern in the mind and body. The brain’s natural role is to look for potential threats to keep you safe. Sometimes this protective system becomes overactive, meaning anxious thoughts and sensations appear even when there is no real danger.

Can anxiety happen for no reason?

It can sometimes feel as though anxiety appears without a reason. Often there may not be a single clear cause. Instead anxiety may develop gradually through patterns of worry, stress or overthinking.

Why does anxiety keep coming back?

Anxiety can continue when the mind and body become used to reacting in a particular way. Repeated patterns of thinking, imagining worst-case scenarios or focusing on possible threats can keep anxiety active.

Can therapy help anxiety?

Many people find therapy helpful for understanding anxiety and learning ways to change patterns of thinking and feeling. Approaches such as hypnotherapy can help calm the nervous system and reduce anxious thinking patterns.

If anxiety is becoming more frequent or starting to affect everyday life, it may help to recognise some of the signs your anxiety is getting worse.

And if you’d like a deeper understanding of why anxiety happens and what genuinely helps, you can also listen to Episode 1 of the Dan Regan Hypnotherapy Podcast: Understanding Anxiety – Why It Feels So Overwhelming and What Actually Helps.

 

You Don’t Need To Keep Wondering Why

Rather than focus on why you feel anxious, it is more helpful to focus on how you feel anxious. What are you imagining or saying to yourself in your head? Hypnotherapy for anxiety helps you to be able to interrupt, challenge, change and replace those negative thoughts. You can also ask what you are doing in your body. And then you can do things that help you to change how you feel.

You could spend a long time searching and searching for the why of anxiety. It is much easier to change a thought or to positively influence a feeling. And, of course, you can do things differently too.

If you’ve been asking yourself “Why do I feel anxious?” for months or even years, you’re certainly not alone.

Many people discover that once they stop searching for the perfect explanation and start understanding how anxiety works, things begin changing surprisingly quickly.

If you’d like support, you can learn more here:

• Anxiety Support Hub
• Anxiety Hypnotherapy in Ely
• Hypnotherapy Reviews in Ely

Or arrange a free initial consultation. There’s no pressure, just an opportunity to understand what’s been happening and what might help.

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Anxiety Therapist in Ely & Newmarket

 

Could use some help to calm your anxiety? Struggling with anxiety, stress, worry and fear and need some help? Find out how I can help with a Complimentary Hypnotherapy Strategy Session. Learn more here: Appointments

Find out what hundreds of other people have said after their anxiety hypnotherapy sessions with Dan: Hypnotherapy Testimonials

And check out these popular and powerful hypnosis downloads that can start helping you right away with anxiety, confidence and more: Hypnosis Downloads