Finding the Deeper Meaning of Anxiety: Is it a Signal?

May 1, 2025

Does living with anxiety sometimes feel like you’re constantly fighting an invisible battle? Maybe you’ve tried everything: deep breathing, mindfulness, challenging anxious thoughts. Yes, these tools can help turn down the volume in the moment, making daily life more manageable.

But what happens when that anxiety keeps coming back, sometimes even stronger than before? What if, despite your best efforts, you still feel stuck in this cycle?

Most therapies treat anxiety like it’s the main issue—something to reduce, manage, or fix. And while those strategies can be helpful in the short term, they often miss a crucial piece of the puzzle:

Anxiety isn’t just an emotion; it’s a signal.

Why Anxiety Isn’t Always the Real Issue

Think of anxiety like a smoke alarm. The loud, insistent alarm is designed to get your attention because there might be a fire, the real danger, somewhere else. While you want to quiet the alarm eventually, your first priority is to understand why it’s going off in the first place.

Anxiety often shows up when deeper, core emotions start to rise to the surface, emotions like anger, sadness, guilt, shame, or even excitement.

If those emotions feel unsafe, overwhelming, or uncomfortable, your brain and body step in to shield you, often ramping up anxiety as a way to protect you from having to feel those deeper feelings.

What is Your Anxiety Trying to Tell You?

We all have core emotions. They’re natural, physical responses that give us valuable information about our experiences and needs.

Anger might be telling you about a boundary that’s been crossed
Sadness could be pointing to a significant loss
Guilt might bubble up when we’ve acted against our own values

But sometimes we learn, often without even realizing it, that expressing or even feeling certain emotions isn’t okay. Maybe showing anger felt dangerous in your family growing up, or perhaps your sadness was brushed aside. When these genuine feelings get pushed down repeatedly, anxiety can become your default response whenever they try to surface again.

Anxiety as a Defense

The “Triangle of Conflict,” a model from Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), helps us understand this pattern. When a core feeling (like anger or sadness) starts to come up, it can trigger anxiety. That anxiety, in turn, activates defenses—behaviors or thought patterns (such as intellectualizing, distraction, or self-criticism) that push the original feeling back down.

Recognizing this pattern can be empowering. It helps us see that anxiety itself, while very real and challenging, might be part of a bigger picture. As psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel points out, anxiety can serve as a valuable signal, directing us toward the core emotions that need our attention for true emotional wellbeing.²

Getting Curious About Your Anxiety

This understanding invites a different approach to anxiety.

So instead of asking, ‘How do I get rid of this anxiety?’ we ask, ‘What might this anxiety be protecting me from feeling? What emotion is trying to be heard?’

This is a big shift from trying to “calm down” or “cope better.” Instead it allows you to get curious, not just about the anxiety—but what’s underneath it.

This shift in perspective isn’t about overanalyzing or blaming yourself for feeling anxious. Instead, it’s about approaching your anxiety with gentle curiosity—moving beyond just managing symptoms and starting to explore what your anxiety might be trying to communicate.

Why Understanding Anxiety’s Meaning Matters for Healing

In this approach, anxiety becomes a doorway, not a dead end. And healing comes not just from managing symptoms, but from safely feeling what was once too hard to feel.

When we approach anxiety with curiosity, we receive an invitation to explore what’s happening on a deeper level, preferably within a safe and supportive relationship (like therapy).

By turning toward these underlying feelings with compassion, the anxiety that guarded them often begins to soften. This process helps resolve the internal conflict at the root, leading to more lasting change and a greater sense of wholeness.

If you find yourself struggling with persistent anxiety, feeling like you’re just managing symptoms without getting to the core issue, maybe it’s time to get curious about what lies under the surface. Exploring these deeper emotional layers in therapy can be truly transformative.

Rethinking Your Relationship with Anxiety

The way we understand anxiety is evolving, moving beyond simply managing symptoms to exploring what’s underneath. What often feels like random worry is frequently your mind’s protective response, signaling deeper emotions that haven’t yet been safely felt or understood.

Approaches like ISTDP, EMDR, and other emotion-focused therapies aren’t just about suppressing anxiety. They’re grounded in understanding how our brains process emotion and threat, helping us gently access and work through the core feelings that anxiety might be covering. These methods offer real strategies for shifting long-standing patterns.

If you feel like you’re just treading water with anxiety management, or if you’re curious about why you feel anxious and ready to look deeper than coping skills, this approach may offer a new path toward more fundamental change.