words by Elizabeth April, a Spiritual Coach and Author of Your Anxiety Is Giving Me Anxiety: A Survival Guide for Thriving in a High-Stress World

For most of my life, anxiety felt like an uninvited guest who refused to leave. I tried everything to evict it, therapy, yoga, crystals, meditation, sage, oat milk lattes, you name it. Each “solution” worked for about five minutes before anxiety showed up again, waving like, “Hey, did you miss me?”

Eventually, I realised no one was coming to save me from it. Not my doctor, not my meditation app, not even the algorithm that promised me “Three Easy Ways to Calm Down Instantly!” I had to become my own expert, my own healer, my own slightly frazzled spiritual scientist. So, I stopped outsourcing solutions and decided to decode anxiety myself. Spoiler: once I stopped treating anxiety like an enemy and started seeing it as a messenger, everything changed.

The Day I Realised Anxiety Wasn’t Bad

Anxiety, I discovered, isn’t a malfunction. It’s an alert system, what I lovingly call the spidey sense, that pings when something in your environment or energy field shifts. Think of it like your body’s built in wifi detector, except, instead of finding networks, it picks up vibes. Your heart races, your palms sweat, your brain starts auditioning for a worst-case-scenario drama series, and you think something’s wrong with you. But really, that’s your intuitive radar saying, Something’s different. Pay attention.

The problem is that most of us never learned how to interpret that signal. We feel the ping and automatically assume danger. I used to spiral at every alert, what if I mess up? What if they don’t like me? What if my dog develops an existential crisis? Until I realised the signal itself was neutral. It was my response that decided whether it turned into excitement or anxiety. Once I learned that, I stopped trying to shut anxiety off and started listening to what it wanted to tell me. That’s when everything started to change.

When You Can’t Breathe, Check Your Bandwidth

At my lowest point, I was the human version of a browser with 47 tabs open. Every emotion, every person’s energy, every world event was downloading straight into my nervous system. That’s what I call the Oversaturated Sponge Syndrome. Take a moment right now to imagine a sponge in your kitchen sink. You fill that sponge up with water to the point where it simply can’t hold anymore. In fact, one more drop creates a cascade of water flowing out… if you haven’t realised, you are the sponge in this example and the water is the chaos of the world around you. We empaths and over-thinkers are basically energetic sponges in a world overflowing with information. We scroll, absorb, and react until our mental hard drives crash. Sound familiar? That constant tight-chest, racing-mind, can’t-catch-a-breath feeling isn’t you being broken, it’s you being too full. Full of the noise and chaos of life. We don’t realise it at the time, but we are picking up on everything all around us, and if we don’t stop to slow down or release it, it will accumulate into a constant feeling of restlessness.

The fix wasn’t a new app or a guru, it was a detox. I had to wring out my metaphorical sponge. For me, that meant boundaries, decluttering (physical and emotional), along with unapologetic alone time. The more I drained what wasn’t mine, the lighter I felt. You can’t heal anxiety if you’re drowning in everyone else’s energy. Sometimes peace starts with mute notifications, on your phone and in your relationships.

One of the rules I put into place that really helped me balance was creating, over consuming. I realised that all I do throughout the day is consume. Whether it’s the news, caffeine, endless scrolling or a whole bag of chips, I was always on the hunt for that next quick fix. My nervous system wasn’t anxious for no reason, it was just asking for silence. By bringing awareness to my overconsumption habits, I began outputting just as much as I input. That looks like writing, stretching, calling a friend, taking a bath or just staring into space for a bit. If anxiety is an energy overload, slowing down and installing boundaries is a good solution. Lower your external stimulation by cleaning up your room, your phone apps, your desktop folders and even your contact list, you’ll thank me later.

Healing the Past to Calm the Present

Most of my chronic anxiety wasn’t about the now, it was about unfinished business. Old emotions I’d stuffed in the closet, hoping they’d disappear never truly went away. If every day a new phone alarm goes off and we simply ignore it, eventually it’ll feel like we have 500 screaming alarms all needing our attention. This is how past unhealed trauma accumulates into persistent anxiety. Every ignored feeling becomes another open browser tab slowing your system down. I learned to sit with discomfort instead of running from it. Sometimes that looked like journaling, sometimes ugly crying in my car, sometimes writing “Dear Universe, what the actual hell?” letters I never sent. And when I really wanted closure, I wrote cord-cutting letters, a technique from my book where you release old energetic attachments by writing, feeling, and then (safely) burning the pages. Dramatic? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely. Because peace isn’t found in ignoring the past, it’s found in finally turning toward it and saying, “I see you, I hear you, you are now safe to heal”.

Reprogramming My Brain (One Weird Trick That Actually Worked)

For years, I reacted to every anxious thought like it was a five-alarm fire. My brain yelled, “We’re not safe!” and I believed it, but didn’t know how to heal it. Then I discovered something revolutionary: I could retrain my brain to chill.

That’s where my ReNU method came from: Recognise, Neutralise, Utilise.

• Recognise: Notice when anxiety shows up. Label it out loud: “Oh, that’s just my spidey sense saying hi.”
  
• Neutralise: Breathe, remind yourself you’re safe, while you observe the thought or fear objectively.
  
• Utilise: Once you’re calm, ask, “What is this trying to show me?” Maybe it’s a boundary you need, or a new direction calling you.

In today’s world, we never actually take the time to slow down and feel, especially when that feeling makes you unbearably uncomfortable. By simply slowing down, recognising when you are feeling unsettled and then observing that feeling, the emotional, cognitive and behavioural response diminishes dramatically. Once the negative reaction no longer exists, we can then ask important questions in order to gain access to important information. When you stop fighting anxiety and start decoding it, it transforms from a bully into a guide.

My Anxiety Didn’t Disappear: It Evolved

Do I still get anxious? Absolutely. It just doesn’t show up as a problem anymore. Anxiety is my intuition dressed in a drama queen costume. It’s the universe’s way of getting my attention when I’m out of alignment. And honestly, it’s kind of a superpower. It’s the reason I’m self-aware, empathetic, and endlessly curious about what makes us tick. Anxiety didn’t destroy me, it redirected me.

So if no one else has been able to solve your anxiety, maybe that’s the point. Maybe you were meant to. Because when you finally stop outsourcing your healing and start listening to yourself, you realise something radical: You were never broken. You were just awakening.

image credit: Twin Flame Photography