Anxiety has been medicalized, labelled, packaged, and sold back to us as a personal malfunction. A chemical imbalance. A disorder of the individual. Something wrong with your wiring that needs correction.
But step back for a moment and ask a quieter, more dangerous question.
What if your anxiety is not a defect, but a signal.
Humans did not evolve in open plan offices, infinite notifications, social comparison algorithms, or economies that demand constant productivity without meaning. The nervous system you carry was built to detect danger, uncertainty, and loss of control. It was designed to react when something is off.
And something is very off.
Modern life asks your body to stay calm while everything meaningful is unstable. Work is precarious. Identity is performative. Rest is guilt ridden. Community has been replaced with metrics. Attention is harvested. Time is fragmented. Safety is theoretical. Purpose is optional.
Your nervous system does not speak in essays or spreadsheets. It speaks in sensations. Tight chest. Racing thoughts. Hypervigilance. Fatigue. Dread without a clear object.
We call that anxiety. But biologically, it is coherence seeking behaviour. Your system is saying this environment does not match the assumptions it was built on.
Psychology often treats anxiety as an internal error to be silenced. Philosophy asks a different question. What is this feeling responding to.
Anxiety increases when agency decreases. When your actions feel disconnected from outcomes. When values and survival are misaligned. When the future feels uncontrollable but you are told to stay positive anyway.
In that sense, anxiety can be an honest response to living in conditions that require emotional suppression to function.
This does not mean anxiety is always helpful. Signals can become distorted. Alarms can get stuck on. Chronic stress can rewire perception until everything feels like a threat. Real suffering deserves real care. Therapy, medication, and support save lives and matter deeply.
But treating anxiety only as pathology misses its message.
Sometimes anxiety is what happens when a sane mind refuses to fully adapt to an insane system.
Self help culture often tells you to breathe through it, reframe it, optimise around it. Be resilient. Be grateful. Be calm in circumstances that no organism was designed to tolerate indefinitely.
True healing is not just calming the nervous system. It is realigning life.
It is asking where your energy is leaking into expectations that are not yours. Where speed has replaced depth. Where survival has crowded out meaning. Where your body is forced to say no because your mouth keeps saying yes.
Anxiety eases when life becomes more honest. When boundaries replace overextension. When purpose replaces noise. When your days make sense to your values. When rest is allowed without justification. When connection is real rather than performed.
The goal is not to eliminate anxiety entirely. A world without anxiety would be one where nothing matters.
The goal is to listen before it has to scream.
You are not broken for feeling overwhelmed in a world that is overwhelming by design. You are not weak for struggling in conditions that demand constant adaptation without offering stability. Your anxiety does not mean you are failing at life. It may mean you are paying attention.
And here is the part most people never tell you.
When you stop treating anxiety as an enemy and start treating it as information, you regain agency. You move from what is wrong with me to what is wrong with how I am living.
That shift changes everything.
Anxiety is not always a call to fix yourself. Sometimes it is a call to stop pretending that a misaligned world should feel comfortable.