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The Cure for Anxiety & Restlessness

The Cure for Anxiety & Restlessness

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 Welcome to a new episode about anxiety, worry, and the ways we can meet our inner unrest with curiosity and compassion. Today, we’re diving into a topic that touches nearly everyone at some point in life—anxiety. Whether it’s a fleeting sense of unease or a persistent, disruptive force, anxiety is something most of us know all too well. In fact, about 15 percent of people will experience anxiety at a level that qualifies as a disorder in any given year, and even more will go through periods of stress, worry, or psychological discomfort. But what if there were some universal principles—simple, but not always easy—that could help us navigate this labyrinth? That’s what we’ll explore together in this episode. So, wherever you are, take a deep breath, settle in, and let’s begin this journey into understanding anxiety—and ourselves—a little better. Anxiety is a phenomenon with many faces. There are countless subtypes—generalized anxiety, panic disorder, agoraphobia, social anxiety, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each has its own flavor, but they all share a common thread: a sense of inner tension, worry, or fear that can be hard to shake. And we live in a world that seems, in many ways, to be growing more anxious. Some even talk about an “anxiety epidemic,” as more and more people are diagnosed with anxiety disorders. In Norway, for example, it’s estimated that one in four people will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. Why is this happening? There are many possible explanations, but one idea that stands out is the paradox of safety. In our quest to make life ever safer—padded playgrounds, endless regulations, constant monitoring of risks—we may inadvertently be creating more anxiety. When we focus so intensely on safety, we also become hyper-aware of everything that could go wrong. To know what’s safe, we must also know what’s dangerous. And when we’re always scanning for danger, it’s easy to become anxious. This is especially apparent in children and young people. As we try to shield them from every possible harm, we may also be teaching them to be afraid. The intention is good, but the result can be more worry, more avoidance, and more anxiety. It’s a bit like trying to suppress a thought—when you tell yourself not to think about something, that thought becomes even more persistent. The same goes for anxiety: the more we try to avoid it, the more it sticks around. To understand anxiety, it helps to look at how our brains work. We often talk about two main parts: the “reptilian brain,” the ancient, reflexive part that handles basic survival responses like fight, flight, or freeze; and the prefrontal cortex, the newer part responsible for planning, self-reflection, and predicting the future. When the prefrontal cortex doesn’t have enough information to predict what’s coming, it generates a sense of unease. That’s anxiety—a signal that something is uncertain, unpredictable, or potentially threatening. But here’s the tricky part: when anxiety flares up, our rational brain—the prefrontal cortex—often shuts down. Logical reasoning becomes hard, if not impossible. That’s why it’s so difficult to “think your way out” of an anxiety attack. The goal in therapy, then, isn’t to convince yourself that your anxiety is irrational or wrong. Instead, it’s about rewiring those deep, automatic responses in the older parts of the brain. But how do we do that? One useful way to think about anxiety is as a kind of addiction. Not in the sense of substance abuse, but in the sense of habitual, automatic responses to uncomfortable feelings. Addiction, in this broader sense, is anything we do that we know isn’t helpful in the long run, but we do it anyway—buying things we can’t afford, scrolling endlessly on our phones, drinking to numb discomfort. These are all ways of coping with emotional pain, and they often provide short-term relief at the cost of long-term well-being. With anxiety, the habitual response is often worry. When we feel uneasy, our brains leap into action, trying to solve the problem by worrying about it. Worry gives us the illusion of control, the sense that we’re “on top of things.” But in reality, worry just distracts us from the original feeling and often creates even more anxiety. It becomes a loop—a habit that’s hard to break because it feels, on some level, like it’s helping. Our brains are wired to create these habit loops. When something works—even once—the brain remembers it and stores it away as the default response for similar situations in the future. Over time, these patterns become automatic, running in the background without our conscious awareness. Some researchers estimate that up to 50 percent of our behaviors are driven by these unconscious loops. That’s why it’s so hard to change them: we’re not even aware they’re happening most of the time. To ...
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