1. Anxiety as Self-Protection:

The human mind is good at playing tricks on us. Sometimes anxiety takes the place of another emotion, thought, or memory that our organism deems more threatening. For example, we may be angry about something, but afraid of our own anger, so we feel anxious instead. Or we may have serious doubts about our marriage, but instead of facing that reality, we start to feel physical symptoms and worry about our health... In this way anxiety is sometimes the price we pay when we unconsciously distract ourselves from the real issue we are not ready to face...

2. Anxiety as Overactive Alarm:

Anxiety tends to serve as an alarm signal that warns us of dangers to our psychological or emotional survival. We may for example be afraid to give a speech because the embarrassment of making a mistake feels like it would literally destroy us, or we may have an exaggerated fear that our partner will leave us because we were abandoned as a child. These kinds of fears are often rooted in negative or traumatic events that at one point overwhelmed our capacity to cope...

3. Anxiety as Avoidance:

Sometimes we don't even feel our anxiety because we have become very skilled at engaging in strategies to avoid it. We may for example procrastinate, avoid situations or people, convince ourselves everything is fine, or be forgetful about unpleasant memories from the past. However, as soon as one of these tactics no longer works, our anxiety will come back and often with full force.

4. Anxiety as Fundamental Insecurity:

Sometimes the anxiety we feel is really the result of a fundamental lack of acceptance and comfort with who we are. Many people who feel flawed, inadequate, or unacceptable at their core spend their lives fleeing from themselves and pretending to be someone they are not. This kind of escape from oneself generates even more anxiety because no matter who we succeed in changing ourselves into we are never at peace with ourselves.