Right now, as I write this, I am picking my nails, pulling at my beard, pushing my thumb into the palm of my hand. This is the first paragraph of an article on anxiety, and my body knows it. Something is building, something I am not quite sure about, something that could be hard. And yet I know that once I get going, I will be fine.

That is anxiety. Not a disorder. Not a malfunction. Information.

If you have arrived here after searching the word “anxiety,” you will have passed through an overwhelming wave of diagnoses, categories, techniques, potions, mindfulness scripts and breathing exercises, all of them premised on the same assumption: that anxiety is something wrong with you, something to be reduced, managed or cured. This article is not that.

A natural phenomenon, not a disorder

When we name something a disorder, curiosity stops. We label it, file it, fix it. We begin to relate to it from a cognitive distance, as though it were happening to us rather than in us, as though it were an intruder rather than a messenger. Every nervous system response is a natural phenomenon. Anxiety is no exception. It is your body doing something for a reason, and the most useful question you can ask is not “how do I make this stop” but “what is this telling me, and is it still relevant?”

It starts in the body, and it starts early

My earliest memory of anxiety is vivid. I am three or four years old, in my aunt’s garden, digging with a red-handled metal fork. A bee appears. I know bees sting, so I step back. Flight. But the bee seems to follow me, so I pick up the fork and wave it in front of me. Fight. I end up running around the garden, fork raised, a bee apparently in determined pursuit. My nervous system was doing exactly what nature designed it to do: read a signal, generate a response, and move me towards safety.

Not long after, I refused to go to the school canteen. It was noisy, full of older children, nothing like the warm familiarity of home. I sat down in the classroom and cried. Eventually, my father came. He took my hand and walked me into that tin-shed of a room with its hundred children and crashing acoustics. He sat me next to a girl I felt safe with, and that was enough. My nervous system settled because the relational context had changed. I was not broken. I was responding. And what settled me was not a technique or a strategy; it was the felt safety of another person.

How a response becomes a pattern

Well into my twenties, I was still having a physical reaction to bees and wasps. I would freeze, shut my eyes, try to pretend I was not afraid, though my body told a different story entirely. It had logged that early experience and kept the file open.

Then, as a primary school teacher, a bee got into the classroom. Children were shouting, running, and screaming. I was the adult in the room. I found a glass and a piece of card, captured the bee, opened the window and let it go. From that day on, my body stopped reacting as it once had. The pattern broke, not through a technique or a course of treatment, but through action in a relational context, being the person someone else needed me to be.

This is how anxiety works. It begins as a genuine response to something real. Over time, the nervous system learns to anticipate, to fire early, to stay on alert in situations that echo the original one, even when the actual danger is long gone. It is not irrational. It is a pattern, wired in for good reasons, and it can be rewired.

When anxiety takes over

I have been a performer most of my adult life, and I learned early on to recognise performance anxiety as excitement, energy I could channel rather than suppress. But I have also had social anxiety so severe that I could not easily speak to people. My response was cigarettes and a great deal of beer, enough to get me through the door. It helped in the short term, but it did not touch the anxiety itself. If anything, the anxiety grew, became less predictable, harder to read.

And then there was The Gambia.

The breaking point

I was leading a group on an African drumming trip when one of the group members became seriously ill and died. After contacting the insurers, arranging accommodation, and ensuring everyone got home safely, I was calm, practical, and present, the person the situation required. That evening, I sat in the bar with a friend, and we talked it through. Everything felt steady.

Then I got up to walk to the toilet, and I fainted.

I came round to find four men carrying me through the streets, aloft, running, shouting, taking me to the nearby hospital, the same hospital where she had died. Passing that room again felt surreal. The rest of the night passed in that same ward. When the doctor discharged me the following morning, I asked him whether I was going to die. He said no. He said I had had a panic attack.

My nervous system is wired for movement, organisation and decisive action under stress. That is what it did, and it did it well. But it has an overload point. What I understand now, looking back, is that I might have reached that point later, or not at all, had I allowed myself to share the weight with my friend that evening rather than holding it alone, telling him not just what had happened, but how it felt to be the one responsible. The nervous system settles in the presence of another person. That is not a weakness. That is how we are built.

What actually helps

There are no universal techniques. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What matters is noticing: noticing what your body is doing, and finding a way to shift the energy in whatever way works for you in that moment. Scrolling on your phone is a mild anxiety symptom. What can you do as you swipe through that essential video of a dog rescuing a duck from a raging river? Notice it, stop, go for a walk in the park. When you find yourself checking your emails every thirty seconds, bake a cake. When your attention scatters, try focusing on one thing or one person, completely and without distraction.

As a pianist, I used to shake my hands and flex my fingers for a full minute before sitting down to play. It was my way of moving the energy through rather than sitting on it. More recently, in Zoom training sessions, I found my attention drifting, my hands rubbing together, unable to engage with what was in front of me. I bought a fidget toy. It worked: a small, quiet outlet for the energy, and I could stay present.

The question worth asking yourself is this: Is the anxiety pulling you into the present moment, or is it pulling you out? The answer usually tells you something about what it needs.

A word, if you have been given a diagnosis

A doctor may have diagnosed you with an anxiety disorder, recommended CBT, or prescribed medication – or all three. I am not here to dismiss any of that. What I am suggesting is something that can sit alongside it: a more personal curiosity about what is actually happening in your body, and what stories your mind is constructing around it. Anxiety is often protecting you from something. It is worth asking what that is, and whether the protection is still necessary, or whether it belongs to an earlier chapter of your life.

What your body already knows

For most of us, most of the time, anxiety is not a disorder. It is a nervous system doing its job, a body that learned something once and has not yet been shown that things have changed. It is information, sometimes urgent, sometimes subtle, always worth attending to.

Your body generated this anxiety. It is quite capable of living with it, channelling it, moving it on.

You do not need to make it go away. You need to listen to what it is telling you.