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Anxiety is not a one-size-fits-all experience.

There are four systems impacted by anxiety.

When anxiety starts to feel like information rather than a verdict, you've changed your relationship with it.

We all know anxiety is pervasive these days—chances are you or someone you love is struggling with it. And you may have experienced that the tools and strategies that work for your friend don’t work for you. Or maybe you’ve tried therapy and find that it is only taking you so far. Why is it that what works for one person doesn’t work for the next? Or that what works some of the time doesn’t work all the time?

In my previous post, "What Is Your Anxiety Type?" I described three patterns, or anxiety types, that anxiety tends to organize around. Knowing your anxiety type is an important place to start.

Beyond understanding your anxiety type, it is also important to know that anxiety is a multi-system experience—meaning that it affects you across four channels:

There is a constant interplay across these four channels, but research shows they don’t necessarily move together in sync. What this means is that you may experience intense somatic symptoms of anxiety without accompanying anxious thoughts, or you might experience repetitive anxious thoughts with very little behavioral activation. In other words, each person’s presentation of anxiety is unique.

So what does this mean for you and your anxiety journey?

First, it is helpful to begin noticing how your anxiety presents across all four channels. You might track this on a piece of paper or in a journal. Create a section for each channel, and start to identify what you notice in each section when you are feeling anxious.

What subjective emotions are present when you feel anxious?

What thoughts and beliefs accompany your anxiety?

What do you do when you are anxious? Think about both active behaviors and avoidant ones.

What physical sensations do you experience when anxious, and where? For example, do you notice muscle tension, breathing changes, physical sensations like pins and needles, an “electric current” feeling, or butterflies in your stomach? Where in your body do you feel this?

Next, consider if, among these four quadrants, there are any you tend to overlook. It is common to focus on what is most prominent, which makes sense. Yet, if you work only with your experience of anxiety in those prominent features, you are missing other aspects of anxiety and ways to work with it. Ignoring any of the four may keep you stuck in anxiety.

If your experience of anxiety is primarily cognitive and you are working with it only through reframing your thoughts, you may get stuck if you aren’t also allowing yourself to feel emotions or to connect to the physical manifestations of your anxiety. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor has observed that the physiological wave of an emotion, when fully felt, lasts approximately 90 seconds. What extends it far beyond that is the story we build around it—the resistance, the rumination, the refusal to let it be felt. Feeling an emotion fully is often the fastest way through it.

Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

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Attending to your physical state can shift the way you experience yourself, others, and your environment. Have you ever been sitting in traffic, late, and agitated? Your body is tense, your mind is cataloguing everything that's going wrong. But then you consciously relax your grip on the steering wheel, unclench your jaw, and take a slow breath. Within moments, the situation feels less catastrophic. Maybe you start to sing along to a favorite song and forget all about being late. The traffic didn’t change; you did.

If you are keenly aware of your emotions and physical sensations when anxious, are you also attending to the beliefs and behaviors that accompany them? Our brains are meaning-making machines, and repetitive thought patterns become default neural pathways. Addressing anxiety across all four channels means not just noticing what your body feels but also examining the thoughts and behaviors that follow.

The bottom line? Anxiety is not a one-size-fits-all experience. The path through it begins with knowing yourself: your type, your channels, and which ones you tend to ignore.

Start there. Track what you notice. Get curious rather than reactive. Because when anxiety starts to feel like information rather than a verdict, you've already changed your relationship with it.

And that's a very good place to start.

Shannon E. Grogans, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Kristin A. Buss, Lee Anna Clark, Andrew S. Fox, Dacher Keltner, Alan S. Cowen, Jeansok J. Kim, Philip A. Kragel, Colin MacLeod, Dean Mobbs, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Miquel A. Fullana, Alexander J. Shackman, The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 151.

Taylor, J. B. (2008). My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. Viking.

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