Why Experts Advise, ‘Treat Anxiety As Your Best Ally, Not Your Enemy'

Forbes

3 days ago

Most of us unwittingly fight or resist anxiety because it feels like an enemy, but mental health ... More experts advise that treating anxiety as your friend, instead of your enemy, helps reduce it.
You feel your heart pound during a job interview, quarterly review or presentation to colleagues. Butterflies swirl in your stomach before confronting the coworker who talks over you in meetings. And there's that knot in your chest and booming critical voice, lurking over your shoulder, making sure you get it right, as you pitch ideas to your team. While the physical and mental discomfort makes this a hard sell, mental health experts advise that if you start to treat your anxiety as a friend, instead as an enemy, it relaxes.
If you're like most people, you consider anxiety to be an enemy infiltrator that invades your mind and body. When it's sternly warning you--through headaches, indigestion, muscle spasms, body aches, clenched teeth or knots in your chest--you fight, ignore or try to stampede over it. These reactions add insult to injury, fueling the anxiety and exhausting you.
If you combat, fight or battle anxiety, it implies that anxiety is bad, something to get rid of. If you resist and react to anxiety--your bodyguard, your first responder-- it's like fighting the fire department when your house is on fire. It adds insult to injury, activates the sympathetic nervous system (your fight-or-flight response) and intensifies the emotion. Plus, it's exhausting and doesn't work.
Modern-day experts are advising that you befriend versus fight your anxiety. It's counterintuitive, but it's simple physics. Consider someone caught in a riptide. The life saving phrase 'Float Don't fight' was created to help swimmers survive rip currents. Fighting seems like the natural reaction, but it exhausts you and eventually drowns you. Floating parallel to the shore—going with the flow—brings you into dry land. Similarly, kayakers claim the best way to escape if you're trapped in a hydraulic—a turbulent funnel-shaped current—is to relax, and it will spit you out. But the tendency is to fight against the current, and that can keep you stuck, even drown you.
A similar course of action is a beginning point to reduce anxiety—going with it, instead of against it or responding instead of reacting to it. Although this is a hard pill to swallow, understanding that it's your friend, not your enemy, is the best medicine to manage and reduce it, and you can respond to it in a few simple steps.
'Why would I befriend something that is ruining my life?" you ask. This is a hard pill to swallow because it's counterintuitive, so the first step is to shift your perspective. It helps to think of your anxiety as a bodyguard or first responder. It has probably saved your life more times than you can count, and you might not even realize it. It's job is to keep you alert and aware, like an upset parent who swats her toddler, when he runs into busy traffic.
I spoke with psychotherapist Britt Frank, author of the new book, Align Your Mind. "Anxiety isn't the enemy—it's your internal smoke alarm,' she told me. 'Loud? Yes. But it's trying to keep you alive. We don't need to fight anxiety—that's like taking a jackhammer to your smoke alarm. The alarm isn't the problem—it's a signal pointing toward a problem.'
She explains that at its core, anxiety is your brain's way of scanning for threats and preparing you to act. "That heightened awareness, fast-beating heart and mental alertness?' Frank asks. 'Those are signs of a body ready to perform. When harnessed skillfully, anxiety can sharpen your focus, energize your body and give you the edge you need to rise to a challenge. Instead of seeing anxiety as a malfunction, see it as a superpower—one that needs guidance, not rejection.'
Accept it as normal, hardwired in you from birth for protection. Frank advises against thinking of anxiety as a disorder but to understand its true nature, which she describes as 'a finely tuned survival mechanism that's been keeping you alive since birth."
I also spoke with stress physiologist Dr. Rebecca Heiss, author of the groundbreaking new book SPRINGBOARD: Transform Stress to Work For You. Heiss also calls anxiety your Superpower, challenging conventional wisdom and suggesting that you frame stress and anxiety, not as an enemy, but as a powerful ally. She teaches that everybody is hardwired for anxiety and stress, and the only people who don't have it are dead.
Not to mention that anxiety makes us feel alive and thrive. Without anxiety, you wouldn't have as much fun. It gives you that thrill when you watch a suspenseful movie or root for your favorite Superbowl team. It provides excitement when you're on a roller coaster, bungee jumping, taking a safari, going to your first prom, getting married, buying your first house, delivering your firstborn, going through the haunted house at Halloween. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Anxiety has gotten a bum rap.
Frank argues that the goal isn't to banish anxiety; it's to turn it into a high performance coach. You don't achieve by banning anxiety; you succeed when you harness it. That's how Simone Biles won Olympic gold, the Kansas City Chiefs the 2025 Superbowl and Meryl Streep snagged her string of Oscars. Without it, you might not be as successful in your career or your intimate and professional relationships could crumble. You would be more susceptible to danger, and your life could fall apart. And one thing's for sure: you wouldn't be alive right now.
The next time anxiety comes knocking, remind yourself that its function is to shield you. Then observe the emotion by self-distancing, much like inspecting a blemish on your hand. From a bird's-eye view, notice how it's doing its natural job, protecting you as it comes and goes. Frank suggests that, instead of reacting, that you respond to anxiety like a leader. Listen to it without letting it take the wheel, and when you feel it rising, pause and name it—'Here's my inner smoke alarm.'
Once you name it, neuroscience shows that self-talk can help you regulate it. Frank suggests, for example, that you engage in silent conversations with the anxious voice. When you hear it, say to that voice, 'I hear you. I've got this. I'll take it from here' to develop a non-combative relationship with it.
If possible, Frank recommends thanking your anxiety for trying to protect you, then take the lead with it. "Shift your mindset from 'How do I get rid of this?' to 'How can I use this energy?' Channel it into small, focused action—a 'Micro Yes' like writing one sentence, stretching or sending an email. This turns anxious energy into momentum. Over time, your brain learns: stress isn't the enemy; it's fuel. And with practice, you become the one steering the car, not the alarm in the passenger seat.'