18 July 2026 · By Thiago Pires

Why you feel anxious, and why anxiety is not your enemy

You may recognise the scene. The body apparently still, but everything running inside: racing heart, short breath, that tension that does not ask permission. And the thought that comes with it: there is no reason for this, it is just anxiety.

I would like to invite you to drop the word "just" from that sentence.

We learned to treat anxiety as a defect to be silenced. But the phenomenological and existential tradition sees it differently: as a signal. Anguish, Kierkegaard said, is the dizziness of freedom, that lurch in the stomach of someone who realises they have possibilities in front of them and that those possibilities depend on their own choices.

Anxiety almost always shows up where something matters and the future is open. A postponed decision, a conversation not had, a life that could be different. The body anticipates that future and fires, because to the body the possibility is already real. It is like excitement without breath: your own vital energy, stuck, with nowhere to go.

That is why silencing anxiety by force is rarely enough. In my work, the question changes. It is not only "how do I make this stop?", but "what is this trying to show me?". Where there is intense suffering, care is serious and sometimes involves other fronts. But even then, listening changes who you are in front of what you feel.

If anxiety has been taking up a lot of room in your life, we can talk about what it is trying to say.