Anxiety has a way of convincing us that something is wrong. Your heart races, chest tightens, looping thoughts.

A familiar story is stuck on repeat: “Something bad is going to happen and I need to fix this feeling before I can get on with my life”.

From the perspective of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), anxiety is not treated as a problem to eliminate, but as a normal part of human experience that often shows up when we care about something.

Anxiety is the mind’s attempt to protect us. It provides us with important information that we should attend to. However, the challenge is that it can become overprotective — sounding alarms even when there is no immediate danger. When we start organising our lives around avoiding anxiety, our world can slowly become smaller.

ACT seeks to help us build a life that is meaningful so that anxiety is no longer in charge.