What Causes Anxiety: A Deeper Look at Why You Feel Overwhelmed

In 2018, I wrote a blog which explored anxiety in a much simpler way than I would now. After years of counselling experience and humanistic practice, my understanding has deepened. It feels like the right time to revisit anxiety with more nuance.

Anxiety has become one of the most common experiences people bring to therapy, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Many explanations reduce anxiety to symptoms, misfiring systems or faulty thinking. Humanistic psychology offers a different perspective. It understands anxiety as a meaningful response that arises when something inside us becomes too difficult to hold, too conflicted to ignore or too far from the version of ourselves we believe we must maintain.

This article explores anxiety through a deeper, more compassionate lens: phenomenologically, relationally, existentially and through the body. The aim is not only to describe anxiety, but to understand its purpose, its history and what it reveals about the self.

What Anxiety Really Is: More Than a Set of Symptoms
Symptoms matter, but they are only the surface. Beneath the tight chest, racing thoughts, nausea, tension, or dizziness is a psychological and relational process unfolding within the person.

From a humanistic perspective, anxiety emerges when experience presses against our self-concept. Rogers described this as incongruence: the point at which who we are internally contradicts who we believe we must be in order to stay safe, accepted or in control.

You may feel this when:

• You try to appear calm while your body is signalling distress.
• You silence emotions because they feel too disruptive.
• You keep going long after your limits have been reached.
• You perform while feeling internally fragmented.
• You want a connection, but have learnt it comes with risk.

Anxiety is the internal alarm that activates when truth and expectation collide.

Although the symptoms of anxiety are physical, their origin is psychological, relational and often historical. The body responds first because it remembers before the mind can articulate.

The Phenomenology of Anxiety: The Experience From the Inside

Humanistic and phenomenological approaches focus on what anxiety is like to live with, not merely what it looks like on paper. Anxiety is not a single sensation, but a constellation of meanings that rise to our awareness through the body and mind.

People often describe:

• Feeling suspended, as if their inner ground has disappeared.
• A sense of inner pressure that has no clear name.
• Being flooded by emotion yet unable to identify it.
• Strong physical sensations that feel disproportionate or confusing.
• Thoughts that seem intrusive, racing, circular or catastrophic.
• A body that anticipates danger even when the present feels safe.

These experiences may feel irrational in the moment, but they usually make sense when understood in the context of your history. The body responds to cues it has learnt to associate with threat: relational fear, emotional memory, unmet needs or long-standing internal pressure. Anxiety often reflects older patterns being activated, even when nothing in the current situation is genuinely dangerous.

Every presentation of anxiety reflects a person’s history, their relationships and the conditions of worth they have carried throughout their life.

Anxiety Through a Humanistic Lens: Incongruence, Identity and the False Self
Humanistic psychology views people as fundamentally orientated towards growth, authenticity and genuine connection. We naturally move towards becoming more ourselves. Anxiety appears when that movement is disrupted, blocked or feels unsafe. It is often the internal signal that something essential in us is trying to emerge, while another part of us is working hard to keep things as they were.

Incongruence develops when:

• The person’s real feelings clash with the identity they learnt to maintain
• Emotions become too costly to express
• Attachment patterns teach the person that authenticity risks rejection
• Boundaries feel dangerous because they once led to conflict or withdrawal

These contradictions do not simply create tension. They divide the inner world into a true self and a protected self, each pulling in a different direction. The protected self (often called the false self) forms in environments where the person had to adapt to keep relationships stable or to avoid overwhelming emotion. It is a version of self built from conditions of worth, survival strategies and learned relational rules.

For many people, this false self becomes highly functional. It may appear confident, agreeable, capable or resilient. But it does so at the cost of suppressing emotional truth, unmet needs, limits and vulnerability. Over time, the body and psyche strain under the weight of maintaining this constructed identity.

Anxiety often emerges at the point where the protected self can no longer contain what the true self needs. The pressure builds internally: the push towards authenticity meets the fear of consequences. This internal conflict is not pathological. It is a developmental tension. Anxiety becomes the lived experience of a self trying to grow beyond the boundaries set earlier in life.

In this sense, anxiety is not weakness or failure. It is the tension of becoming: the moment the person stands between who they have been taught to be and who they are capable of becoming. 

The Body’s Story: Why Anxiety Is Felt Before It Is Understood
Eugene Gendlin and experiential theorists emphasised the importance of the felt sense: the body’s implicit, pre-verbal understanding of experiences that have not yet been fully processed or symbolised. From this perspective, anxiety is not simply a physiological reaction. It is the body’s attempt to express something that the conscious mind has not yet made sense of.

The body often recognises emotional truth long before the mind has the language or safety to articulate it. This is why so many people describe anxiety as something that “comes out of nowhere”, when in reality the body has been responding to subtle cues, memories, or relational patterns that sit just beneath conscious awareness.

This is why:

• The throat tightens when we want to speak honestly: signalling the conflict between our authentic voice and the internalised fear of how it might be received
• The chest constricts when we override our limits: reflecting the strain placed on a system that has learnt to push through discomfort at the expense of its own well-being
• The stomach drops when we fear disappointment or conflict: reflecting how strongly we rely on relational stability and how threatening it can feel when connection seems at risk.
• Numbness appears when feelings become too overwhelming: showing the body’s attempt to protect itself by reducing sensation when emotional overwhelm exceeds what feels manageable.
• Trembling emerges when long-held emotion begins to surface: demonstrating the release of energy that has been suppressed, contained or split off over time.

The body’s responses to anxiety are not random or dramatic. They are meaningful. They reflect the body’s attempt to protect the self from emotional risk, relational threat or internal contradiction. When a person has spent years accommodating others, avoiding conflict, suppressing emotion or carrying responsibility beyond their capacity, the body becomes the first place where that strain reveals itself. It reacts long before the mind can organise what is happening, because the body has learnt to track subtle cues, old relational patterns and unresolved emotional material.

In many cases, anxiety is the moment the body tries to communicate what has been avoided, minimised or misunderstood for years. The tightening, the heaviness, the drop in the stomach or the surge of restlessness are all ways the organism signals that something internally significant is being activated. These sensations often arise before conscious understanding because the body holds implicit memory, unprocessed emotion and unmet need in a way the thinking mind cannot immediately articulate.

When long-held experiences begin to surface, the body will often “speak” through tension, constriction, numbness, shakiness or a sense of internal pressure. These are not signs of overreaction. They are the early stages of meaning coming into awareness. What initially presents as anxiety frequently becomes clearer when the person slows down enough to notice what the body is moving towards or away from. As these signals are recognised rather than pushed aside, they often reveal themselves to be rooted in understandable emotional truth: fear of disconnection, unresolved hurt, suppressed anger, unmet needs or patterns of self-protection shaped by earlier relationships.

Anxiety and Attachment: The Fear of Being Known, Rejected or Misunderstood
Attachment patterns shape the way people experience themselves in relationships. If early caregiving felt inconsistent, rejecting or unsafe, the nervous system adapts by becoming vigilant, withdrawn, accommodating or overly self-reliant. These adaptations are not flaws. They are relational survival strategies built in response to environments where emotional needs were met unpredictably or conditionally.

These patterns eventually become adult strategies, such as:

• Anticipating abandonment.
• Fearing conflict because it once led to distance or withdrawal.
• Avoiding emotional exposure due to past experiences of being misunderstood or dismissed.
• Overstretching to maintain harmony so the connection does not feel threatened.
• Minimising needs to prevent disappointment or criticism.
• Scanning for subtle relational shifts as a way of predicting danger.
• Struggling to trust their own perceptions when their early reality was questioned or invalidated.

These responses are deeply embodied. They are not chosen consciously. They are learned ways of maintaining closeness, safety and belonging when direct emotional expression once felt risky. Because attachment wounds occur relationally, the body reacts relationally. A raised eyebrow, a delayed reply, a change in tone or a moment of uncertainty can activate the same systems that defended the person years ago.

In adulthood, these patterns can surface as anxiety, especially in moments that evoke relational vulnerability: speaking honestly, setting boundaries, expressing hurt, asking for reassurance or allowing someone to see an unpolished part of the self. The anxiety does not reflect present danger. It reflects old relational templates being activated, causing the body to prepare for outcomes it once experienced as painful or shaming.

This form of anxiety is often an attempt to prevent old wounds from reopening. The body remembers the cost of being misunderstood, ignored or judged, even when the mind is trying to engage in the present moment. Anxiety becomes a protective system that steps in to stop the person from being too exposed, too honest, too needy or too emotionally real in situations where those experiences once felt unsafe.

At its heart, attachment-based anxiety reflects the tension between two powerful human needs:
the need to be authentic, and the need to be accepted. When those needs feel incompatible, anxiety fills the space between them.

The Protective Function of Anxiety: A System Trying to Keep You Safe
Anxiety is not an enemy. It is a protector. Even when it feels overwhelming or intrusive, its purpose is not to harm you but to prevent you from stepping into experiences your system has learnt to associate with threat. Humanistic psychology understands anxiety as a form of internal intelligence: a signal that the psyche is working hard to shield you from emotional overload, relational danger or a feared loss of stability.

Anxiety protects the self from emotional overwhelm, relational threat, shame, unpredictability and perceived danger. What looks like avoidance, overthinking, or catastrophising is often the body’s attempt to stay one step ahead of pain. Catastrophic thinking, for example, is rarely irrational at the root. It is a strategy designed to prepare for loss, disappointment or failure before the shock of it can arrive. The system believes that if it can anticipate every possible outcome, it can prevent the impact of being caught off guard.

Much of this protective work happens outside conscious awareness. The body stores patterns shaped by earlier relationships, unresolved experiences and internalised expectations about what is safe to feel or express. When something in the present echoes an old relational wound or emotional memory, anxiety activates quickly, pulling the person away from exposure, conflict or vulnerability. The body responds first because it carries the history the mind has not yet fully processed.

People experience anxiety as distress, not because they are malfunctioning, but because the system is overworking. The cost of staying safe becomes high. The body tightens, the mind races, the breath shortens, and the nervous system sits in a state of constant readiness. The person may feel as if they are living on alert, but this state often reflects years of internal effort to hold themselves together, manage expectations, avoid relational rupture or keep suppressed emotions contained.

These protective patterns were once necessary. They helped the person survive environments where honesty caused conflict, emotion was dismissed, or vulnerability was met with distance rather than comfort. The difficulty arises later in life, when the same strategies begin to limit authenticity, intimacy and self-expression. The very protections that kept the person safe may now prevent them from living in a way that feels fulfilling or grounded.

Anxiety becomes the tension between who you had to be and who you are becoming.
It is the system saying: “I am trying to protect you, even if I no longer know what protection should look like.”

When understood this way, anxiety is not a sign of weakness but a sign of historical strength. It shows how hard the person has worked to survive experiences that shaped their nervous system. And it points toward places where deeper needs have gone unmet, often for many years.

Anxiety and Overwhelm: Fragmentation, Control and the Fear of Losing the Self
When anxiety escalates beyond the system’s capacity to regulate, the person experiences overwhelm. This overwhelm is not simply too much emotion. It is the point at which the organisation of the self begins to strain. Humanistic and existential theorists describe overwhelm as a state where the structures that usually hold us together lose coherence. The psyche fragments not because it is failing, but because it is attempting to preserve stability by reducing the emotional load.

Fragmentation may appear as:

• Overwhelming thoughts without emotional clarity.
• Emotional flooding that arrives faster than meaning can form.
• Shutting down or going numb to avoid internal collapse.
• Clinging to control in an effort to hold the self together.
• Sudden irritability or withdrawal in order to reduce stimulation.
• Losing access to emotional language because the system has shifted into protection.
• struggling to maintain a stable sense of identity as competing internal states activate.

These experiences reflect a deeper psychological process. Under intense emotional or relational strain, the mind cannot integrate all parts of experience at once. It separates experience into fragments so that none of it overwhelms the whole system. This is not suppression. It is a structural response in which the psyche reorganises itself to survive what feels too intense to face directly.

What often frightens people is not the emotion itself, but the sense of losing their inner centre. They may feel unfamiliar with themselves or momentarily unsure of who they are. This fear of psychological dissolution is profoundly human. It shows how important coherence is to our sense of identity and to our ability to function.

Fragmentation is therefore not a failure of resilience. It is the mind’s attempt to keep the person intact by limiting contact with experiences that exceed their available capacity. When internal or external conditions become safer, the self begins to re-form. Experiences that were split off start to return in manageable amounts, allowing meaning and identity to rebuild in a more integrated way.

Anxiety and Uncertainty: When Life Stops Feeling Predictable
Beyond physiology and relationships, anxiety often contains an existential layer. Existential thinkers have long understood that anxiety intensifies when a person confronts the instability of life, the unpredictability of the future or the realisation that their familiar sense of meaning is shifting. Anxiety grows when the structures that once helped us understand ourselves feel less certain, and when the direction of life no longer aligns with who we believed we were.

Irvin Yalom described this as anxiety that emerges when we face the realities that cannot be avoided, such as change, loss, freedom and uncertainty. These experiences unsettle a person’s inner foundations and can create the sense that the world is no longer organised in the same way. The assumptions that once felt steady begin to loosen.

Existential anxiety becomes most noticeable when the familiar frameworks that organise meaning start to change or dissolve. It is the feeling that life is no longer arranged in a way that is secure or understandable. People often describe this as floating, feeling untethered or becoming disconnected from their usual sense of direction.

People experience existential anxiety when:

• They face major transitions that require them to reorganise their sense of self.
• A role or identity shifts, leaving them unsure who they are becoming.
• They confront loss or illness that challenges the belief that life will remain unchanged.
• The meaning they once relied on no longer feels solid or convincing.
• They sense their life moving in a direction they cannot control, anticipate or slow.

This form of anxiety often feels different from other types. It is not tied to one situation or memory. It is a response to the awareness that life is uncertain and that the self is not fixed. Human beings rely on continuity and coherence to feel stable. When these anchors loosen, anxiety is a natural response to the fragility and unpredictability of existence.

Existential anxiety is not resolved through rational reassurance. Telling ourselves to stay positive or realistic rarely helps. It softens when we approach our experience with honesty rather than avoidance, and when we slowly build a self that can tolerate uncertainty without losing coherence. Grounding, meaning making, relational steadiness and the gradual acceptance of change all help restore a sense of inner footing. As the person develops a self that feels more authentic and more capable of holding life’s unpredictability, the intensity of existential anxiety naturally begins to lessen. For those who want a deeper framework for understanding growth through discomfort and the process of becoming more grounded in themselves, the ideas in my book Life’s Three Fires offer a supportive way of making sense of this inner movement.

How Anxiety Softens: The Humanistic Conditions for Change
Humanistic therapy does not seek to silence anxiety. It seeks to understand what anxiety is expressing and what it has been protecting. Anxiety begins to soften when the person no longer needs to defend themselves against their own experience. This is not a quick process. It is the gradual movement from internal threat to internal safety.

Anxiety naturally begins to soften when:

• The person experiences themselves as accepted rather than judged, which reduces the internal pressure to hide, perform or control their emotions
• Congruence increases, allowing the person to live in closer alignment with their real feelings rather than the identity they once constructed to stay safe
• The self-concept becomes flexible enough to include disowned parts, such as vulnerability, anger, need or uncertainty
• Emotional experience becomes safe enough to feel, so the body no longer needs to use anxiety to push feelings away
• The person understands what their anxiety protects, which reduces shame and increases self-compassion
• Relational contact feels steady enough to reduce vigilance, allowing the nervous system to trust that connection does not require constant monitoring
• The body learns new ways to regulate without shutting down, creating more space for emotional expression and reflection
• Authenticity becomes possible without losing belonging, resolving the old conflict between being true to oneself and staying connected to others

These conditions allow the internal world to reorganise. Anxiety becomes less intense not because it has been controlled or argued with, but because the person’s relationship with themselves becomes more coherent and more compassionate. When experience is allowed to exist rather than be fought, suppressed or feared, the system no longer needs to generate anxiety as a form of protection.

Anxiety reduces when the inner world becomes a place the person can inhabit rather than fear. As the person develops a self that feels coherent and grounded, anxiety is no longer required to hold the system together. It becomes one signal among many, rather than the dominant voice in their internal life.

When Anxiety Becomes a Turning Point
People often seek counselling when anxiety becomes too heavy to manage alone. From a humanistic perspective, this moment is not the beginning of collapse. It is the beginning of truth. Anxiety becomes most intense when the strategies that once kept you protected can no longer carry the weight of your inner world. It signals that something in you is ready to be understood rather than pushed aside.

For many people, anxiety marks the point where authenticity begins to press against old patterns of self-protection. It is the moment the body and mind say that maintaining the familiar is no longer sustainable. This is often experienced as distress, yet it also represents movement. Something essential is trying to come forward, whether a buried feeling, a need that has been denied, or a part of the self that has been kept quiet for too long.

Reaching out for support at this stage is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of readiness. It reflects the desire to move toward a life that feels more honest, more grounded and more aligned with who you are becoming. Counselling provides a steady relational space where these emerging experiences can be met with clarity, depth and compassion rather than fear or avoidance.

George Fortune Counselling - Integrative Humanistic Counsellor.
Telephone & Online Counselling.
Face-to-face counselling.

Book: Life's Three Fires: A reflective guide for understanding yourself, others, and the space between.