The Real Reason Anxiety is SO Intense

Why does your anxiety feel so strong, so persistent, and so much bigger than the things happening in your life? 

In today’s episode, Jessica breaks down the real reason anxiety feels overwhelming — and it’s not because you’re dramatic, broken, or “overreacting.”

Episode Summary

You’ll learn how anxiety’s one job — protecting you from supposed threats — explains overthinking, spiraling, tension, and those moments where your mind jumps to the worst-case scenario instantly. 

Jessica shares personal examples straight from her week (“spending too much money,” “looking stupid,” “forgetting to pay my bills,” “hitting a pedestrian in the dark,” and more) to show how anxiety reacts to anything it perceives as dangerous, whether it’s logical or not.

This episode will help you understand your anxiety more clearly, reduce the shame and self-blame you’ve been carrying, and start relating to your anxiety with compassion instead of fear.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• Why anxiety feels so intense and persistent for so many people
• What anxiety thinks its “job” is — and why that makes it react so strongly
• How your biology, modern life, and learned messages shape your anxiety
• Why anxious threats don’t have to be real to feel real in your body
• How to start identifying what your anxiety is trying to protect you from
• The key mindset shift that immediately softens self-blame and confusion

Key Quotes

“There is a perfectly good reason anxiety is doing this — and it makes complete sense. Anxiety thinks it’s protecting you.”

“What is the threat anxiety sees? What is this anxiety trying to protect me from?”

“This isn’t you. This isn’t who you are as a person. It’s not your fault. You’re not making this happen — this is a process happening in you.”

Main Takeaway

Your anxiety feels so intense because it’s doing the only job it knows how to do: spot potential threats and keep you safe.

The problem is that anxiety reacts to imagined, exaggerated, or future-based threats just as strongly as real ones.

When you understand this, anxiety becomes less mysterious, less shame-inducing, and less overwhelming — and you can finally work with it instead of fighting yourself.

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is for anyone who:

• Feels like their anxiety is “too much” or “doesn’t match the situation”
• Blames themselves for not being “logical” enough when anxious
• Wants to understand why their anxiety feels big and persistent
• Has been searching for answers that feel validating instead of dismissive
• Wants a grounded, compassionate explanation for what’s happening inside them

Connect with Jessica Richards

Instagram: @jessica_richards_counseling

Get My Free Guide: 3 Keys for Quieting Anxiety Now

Get My Weekly Emails: Get On Board Here

Enjoyed the Episode?

If this episode helped you feel seen, understood, or less alone, it would mean so much if you followed the show and left a review. It helps others who struggle with anxiety find this kind of support too. 

*Disclaimer* This show is for information and inspiration. It is not professional mental health counseling or medical advice. If you're struggling, please reach out to a mental health or medical professional.

Topics Covered in This Episode

• why anxiety is so intense
• anxiety protection response
• anxious overthinking
• threat response system
• nervous system anxiety
• chronic anxiety patterns
• why anxiety spirals
• anxiety feels disproportionate

Transcript

00:00:01 Jessica
Why is your anxiety so intense? Why is it so persistent? I've got an answer for you. It's because it's trying to protect you. My name is Jessica Richards and it's not you, it's anxiety. When people come to me in counseling with anxiety,
00:00:22 Jessica
they often don't understand why it's so intense. They're looking at their lives, they're looking at things kind of logically, and they're like, I don't get it. Yes, there's some things that I'm worried about, but there's also this part of them that knows this is a much more intense experience than is really warranted by the things that are going on in their lives. But they're overthinking, obsessing, spiraling, worrying about the worst case scenario. They've got all this tension.
00:00:52 Jessica
It's so unpleasant. They're so amped up in their bodies and they're like, oh my gosh, why is this happening? And like we talked about, they blame themselves for it. But here is the wild thing. There is a perfectly good reason anxiety is doing this and it makes complete sense. Anxiety thinks it's protecting you.
00:01:16 Jessica
at its very heart, this is what it deeply believes it is doing. It is protecting you. So it's caused by those three things we talked about, your biology, this modern life that we're living, that our biology isn't meant for, and the messages you learned. But what it's ultimately doing is trying to protect you. And what anxiety is trying to protect you from is supposed threats.
00:01:44 Jessica
So anxiety sees something, it's looking around, it's scanning, it's living life with you. It sees something that it thinks is threatening to you. And it tries to prevent it, predict it, figure out what's going to happen, and ultimately protect you from that thing that it thinks, that it perceives is threatening to you. So let's test out this theory real quick.
00:02:11 Jessica
Think about your anxiety. Think about anxiety you experienced today or some anxiety that you've experienced this week. When you were anxious, what was that anxiety trying to protect you from? It was probably a situation, a person, a feeling, an experience, something
00:02:34 Jessica
that anxiety saw as a potential threat, as possibly harmful, threatening, uncomfortable, unpleasant for you, and it's trying to protect you from it. So I can give you a couple of examples from my week, some things that anxiety tried to protect me from. Spending, quote, too much money, looking stupid, forgetting to pay my bills.
00:03:00 Jessica
Having all my clients hate me and everyone quit therapy and I have to close down my business and live on the streets. Hitting a pedestrian in the dark. Being labeled a political menace and getting taken by the government. Eating, quote, the wrong food. Making, quote, the wrong
00:03:20 Jessica
life choices and regretting my path. These are all the things this week when I experienced anxiety and I looked and asked, what is anxiety trying to protect me from? These were the things that was trying to protect me from. As you can hear, some of them are big, some of them are small, some of them are things that actually could happen, some of them are quite outlandish.
00:03:44 Jessica
But it doesn't matter. Anxiety still perceived those things as potential threats, potential bad things that could happen to me, and tried to protect me from them by making me anxious about them. So when you hear that list of my stuff, aren't you like, holy cow? I mean, I am. I'm like, holy cow. No wonder I'm anxious.
00:04:10 Jessica
Anxiety sees all those things in my life as threats and tries to protect me from them. Makes me anxious. Of course I have anxiety if all those things are perceived as threats. So what about you? What was anxiety trying to protect you from? What is anxiety trying to supposedly protect you from? Go ahead and name a few things. And as you're naming those things, consider
00:04:40 Jessica
that if anxiety, if some part of you, something in you, the anxious part in you, really thinks these things are threatening to you, of course it's going to strongly react and persistently react to protect you. This is anxiety's only job. So it is trying to be very, very, very good at it. It's only job.
00:05:10 Jessica
So when it's persistent, when it's showing up in these big ways, when it won't let things go, it's because it's one mission in life is to make sure that these bad things don't happen to you, to predict them, prevent them, protect from them. Does that make sense? Kind of let that sink in for a minute, because that is a huge, like epic, giant,
00:05:40 Jessica
realization that has the potential to completely change the way that you experience your anxiety. So just kind of take a moment with that. Anxiety is trying to protect you from supposed threats. Now,
00:06:02 Jessica
here's the time where a lot of us jump in, a lot of people jump in, counseling and myself too, and we say, but the thing is, those things aren't actually threatening to me, or those things aren't actually happening, or they're not likely to happen in the way that anxiety thinks they are. Like they're not going to be
00:06:26 Jessica
actual problems for me. Anxiety is really exaggerating things. It's really blowing things out of proportion. It's really grasping at straws. It's really looking for things. And the response to that, my response to that is, yes, that's it. That's absolutely it. So the threats that anxiety sees are not actual threats most of the time.
00:06:55 Jessica
They are not actual things that are going to happen to you. They're not immediate. They're things that anxiety has kind of like extrapolated or made up or predicted, or maybe like there's a kernel of truth in it, but it's not going to be anything like anxiety says, or maybe it's something that like could happen in the future, but it's not present right now. So these quote unquote threats
00:07:23 Jessica
are not actual threats. They're not going to immediately harm you right now in the present, or they're not going to harm you. They're not going to hurt you in the way that anxiety says they are going to. So this is the second key. Anxiety sees threats, but these threats are not actual threats. The things that anxiety sees are things that imagines, anticipates, predicts, or guesses could harm you.
00:07:53 Jessica
But here's the thing. Anxiety isn't capable of stopping to consider whether these things are actually harmful or threatening to you or whether they're not. It just reacts. That's what anxiety is. That's what anxiety does. And we'll talk about this in a future episode, but this is what the biology of anxiety does. It's not capable.
00:08:17 Jessica
It's not part of its job to stop and actually assess. Its job is to just see the threat, potential threat, predict it, imagine it, anticipate it, and react to it. That is the nature of anxiety. That's what anxiety is. So it is not really going to do us the favor. It doesn't do us the favor, as we all know, of actually stopping to say,
00:08:44 Jessica
Is this thing really, really likely to happen? Is it really going to happen in this way before it reacts? That is not what anxiety does. So let's just kind of like lay that out again and name it here. The big reason that anxiety is so intense for you and so persistent is that its only job is to protect you.
00:09:09 Jessica
from things it thinks are threatening, things it thinks are threatening. And it's doing that job very, very, very well. And it doesn't assess whether those things are actually threatening to you or not. Now, for most of us, by the time we're adults, this has become a pattern that is just kind of really
00:09:36 Jessica
set in stone. It's, or feels like it's set in stone. It's become so ingrained. It's been happening this way for so long that it feels like it's just how it is. Like, this is how life is. This is how things are. And it's hard to really see the possibility. It's hard to experience anything else and see the
00:10:00 Jessica
possibility of anything else, because this has become such a deep pattern that's been happening for most of us for a lot of our lives or long enough, even if it's been happening like for the last five years, right? Like that's long enough that a pattern gets established and it starts to feel like this is how it is, this is the way it is, and it feels really hard to break.
00:10:24 Jessica
For some people too, this has been happening so long since they were children, since you were a child, that I've talked to people, and I'm kind of one of them in a way too, who have never really experienced anything different. They don't know anything different. So this just feels like life in the way it is.
00:10:46 Jessica
The day I realized that this was a pattern that was happening for me, my mind just like blew open. I was part of this.
00:10:56 Jessica
this Zen group, and we were doing this year-long retreat where basically every month we'd get this new topic to look at, like sex, food, money, work, relationships, and we'd be guided through a series of questions and exercises. And the questions and exercises were the same every month, even though the topic that we were looking at was different.
00:11:17 Jessica
So every month I'd look at this topic and I'd see all this anxiety around it. And I kept asking the questions that we were supposed to ask, but I was like, why? Like, wow, there's so much anxiety around this. There's so much anxiety around money. There's so much anxiety. Why is this happening? I don't understand. And finally, on the last month in December, I was sitting there and I'm looking back through all my notes and I'm looking and I'm like,
00:11:47 Jessica
my gosh. When I have anxiety about these things, I feel like something bad is going to happen. Like something terrible could happen. And I'm anxious about all these things because I see something that I think could go wrong, could be bad. And then I get worried and I try to protect myself from it.
00:12:14 Jessica
And that just like clicked everything into place because it was forever. I noticed it was every single thing that I was anxious about. This was the pattern. And because I was in graduate school at the time too, I knew the science side of things. I knew that there was literally a biological system in my body that fight, flight, freeze our nervous system. I call it the survival system.
00:12:40 Jessica
that was responsible for looking for threats. So this is what was happening for anxiety whenever I was anxious. I was seeing something that could be threatening or harmful. And from there on out, the way I saw anxiety completely changed. And I basically started sort of repeating this like mantra or this process. Every single time I had anxiety, I would be like, what is the threat?
00:13:08 Jessica
What is the threat anxiety sees? What is the bad thing that could supposedly happen? What is this anxiety trying to protect me from? Because I knew that that's what was happening every time. And no matter how anxious I felt, I'd be like, oh,
00:13:25 Jessica
it's worried I'm going to spend too much money on eating out, and then I'm not going to have any money to put in savings. Or, oh, it's worried that if I give up the secure counseling job and I open my own business, that I'm going to fail, and it's going to be embarrassing, and no one's going to want to work with me. So every time I felt anxious, I would start to be like, what's the threat? What is this protecting me from?
00:13:52 Jessica
And it just completely shifted the way that I felt about the anxiety I was experiencing, the way I felt about myself. And it helped me understand what was really going on. Because anxiety is so persistent and so intense and so overwhelming, it feels really mysterious, right? It's like, what is this? Why is this happening? And it's happening in all these different areas. And what's the thread? What's the thing that connects all this?
00:14:22 Jessica
And this is it. The idea of anxiety seeing a threat and protecting you from a threat. So when you get this, not only do you understand anxiety better and it feels less mysterious and you know what's going on and you know, you start to know that nothing is really wrong, but you can bring in this compassion and kindness and understanding around it, right?
00:14:47 Jessica
Because if this is anxiety's only job, looking for threats and protecting you from them, it's really trying to do its job. And it's doing its job very well for you. And it's been doing that job for a very long time. And it's going to be really ingrained and really habitual. And it's really going to feel like this is how it is. And it's really intense. But we start to understand it doesn't have to be.
00:15:13 Jessica
Because this isn't you. This isn't who you are as a person. It's not your fault. You're not making this happen. This is a process happening in you. And there's reasons it's happening. And anxiety is the thing that's doing it. Anxiety is the thing that's reacting. You're not the one being illogical. You're not the one who's not seeing things clearly. Anxiety is because that's what it does.
00:15:43 Jessica
So this realization alone and the compassion and understanding that you bring to it can save you from totally being in anxiety's grip. Of course, this isn't, you know, the full answer to anxiety, but this is a key, key way to stop from being
00:16:05 Jessica
totally taken over by anxiety and totally confused by it. And this realization alone has saved me and my clients from being completely in anxiety's grip. Because when you don't understand what's happening, why it's so intense, why it's so persistent, when it doesn't make sense, it seems like you and you get more anxious and frustrated.
00:16:27 Jessica
You get angry, exasperated, hopeless, scared, because you're like, why am I doing this? And why can't I be logical about it? And this doesn't make any sense. And when you know what's going on, you can take away that piece, take away that layer, and start seeing anxiety more clearly and understanding it more clearly so you can work with it better and honestly, more effectively so you can start to quiet it down.
00:16:57 Jessica
This is one of those key things, when I talked a couple episodes ago about how I looked for anxiety help, this is one of those, and I didn't find what I was looking for, and it was really honestly demoralizing. It made me feel kind of hopeless. This is one of those key things that no one ever told me, but it's a key thing that made being able to reduce and change anxiety click into place for me.
00:17:24 Jessica
Anxiety is seeing threats and it's reacting to protect you from those threats, whether they're real threats or not. So here's what you can do. Now that you know this, remind yourself of it, you can stop and ask, or you can even just say to yourself, I'm having anxiety right now because anxiety is perceiving a threat and it's trying to protect me from it.
00:17:53 Jessica
And we'll talk about next how some of the ways that we experience anxiety, like overthinking, overwhelm, spiraling tension, how those are actually ways that anxiety then tries to protect us so we can kind of understand this whole process a little bit better. So you can remind yourself, just a simple reassurance like that or a simple reminder,
00:18:19 Jessica
that anxiety is seeing a threat and trying to protect you from the threat. And then if you want to take it a step further, you can ask yourself, what is the threat that anxiety is seeing? What is anxiety trying to protect me from? So it's not you, it's anxiety. Literally not you. This is what anxiety does.
00:18:42 Jessica
and it's not hopeless. And once you start to understand this piece, you have the door open to working with and understanding anxiety better and eventually reducing it. That's something that is totally possible and we'll keep walking through the process together. So stick with me, stick around here, and we will figure that out. You're doing a great job. I'm so glad you're here.
00:19:10 Jessica
And as always, if you want some help starting to find those little key ways to quiet anxiety right now, you can find a link to my guide, 3 Keys for Quieting Anxiety, in the show notes below.
00:19:25 Jessica
We're going to spend the next couple of episodes talking about some of the key ways that anxiety shows up to protect us. Next week is shame, guilt, and blame. Guilt is one of the things that people with anxiety seem to struggle with the most. I've experienced it. My clients talk about it all the time. So let's talk about guilt and anxiety and how anxiety makes us feel guilty to quote unquote protect us. See you next week.