Everything Is Fine. So Why Am I Still Anxious?

Imagine a client. Let’s call her Olha.

Olha has been in therapy for a while. We have already talked about relationships, work, family, old hurts and newer difficulties; some things have become clearer, some she has managed to change, and some she has simply learned to handle a little better.

Then one day she comes in and says:

“I honestly don’t understand what’s going on with me. Everything is fine. I don’t have any major problems, but for some reason I’m anxious all the time, I’m sleeping badly, I can’t properly relax, and I constantly feel as if I’m waiting for something to happen.”

Olha is a very responsible person, so naturally she has already Googled anxiety for no reason from every possible angle and managed to diagnose herself with an anxiety disorder. Please don’t be like Olha and diagnose yourself on Google.

I’m a simple person, so instead of immediately deciding that there really is no reason for her anxiety, I usually suggest that we take a closer look at what exactly she means by “everything is fine.”

What exactly does “everything is fine” mean?

For example, it turns out that Olha moved to another city or another country because there is a war back home, but by now she has an apartment, a job and more or less sorted-out paperwork, so according to her internal scale, the problem has basically been solved.

Except that the move also took away a huge number of things she never used to think about.

She never had to decide where to buy groceries because she simply knew her supermarket. She didn’t have to search for a dentist, figure out how to pay the water bill, find out whom to call when the tap started leaking, work out where to buy decent vegetables, learn how to get across town or decipher the mysterious letter that arrived that morning from some local government office.

Each of these things seems so small on its own that it can feel almost embarrassing to call it a problem.

People are dealing with serious things, after all, and here you are telling your therapist that you’ve spent three days trying to work out where you’re supposed to dispose of an old electric kettle.

But the mind does not keep accounts according to the rule “this problem is serious enough for the energy expenditure to count, and this one isn’t.” Even a small task requires attention when there is no automatic solution for it yet.

Why do small decisions take so much energy?

A little theory. Psychology and cognitive science use the concept of cognitive load to describe the amount of information we have to hold and process while completing a task.

In a familiar environment, a huge part of everyday life happens almost automatically because we know the routes, the rules, the people, the system, the language and more or less what to expect.

When the environment changes, many of those automatic processes disappear at once, and even a simple action can suddenly involve research, comparison, checking and decision-making.

On top of that comes uncertainty, which can maintain a state of tension in its own right because the brain generally feels much more comfortable when it has some idea of what happens next.

That is why constant anxiety does not always appear against the background of one enormous catastrophe. Sometimes it grows against the background of a hundred tiny things, none of which seems important enough on its own to explain how exhausted you feel.

“But I’m not even doing that much”

And this is often where the next interesting part of the conversation begins.

Olha might say:

“I’m not really doing anything special at the moment.”

After a little clarification, it turns out that she works full-time, cooks, cleans, looks after the children, studies the language, deals with paperwork, helps her mother, follows the news, worries about friends, volunteers from time to time and, in her spare time, presumably also weaves camouflage nets, bakes pies and raises ten cats.

And yet the conclusion remains:

“But what am I actually doing? Everyone lives like this.”

This always reminds me of those Instagram reels where a volcano is erupting outside the window, meteors are falling, half the city is on fire, and the person sitting opposite their therapist says very seriously:

“You know, I just haven’t been very productive lately.”

And you would be surprised by how often, in our profession, that joke is not really a joke, because we tend to compare our current productivity not with the conditions we are actually living in, but with some previous version of ourselves from a different life, when there was more predictability, fewer alarming headlines and considerably more energy.

Where does the habit of ignoring our own workload come from?

There can be many reasons, but sometimes we don’t have to look very far.

A ten-year-old child, for example, might have been expected to clean the entire apartment, cook for the family, look after younger siblings or take responsibility for other tasks that were not particularly age-appropriate, without ever hearing, “Wow, you did so much, thank you.”

It may have sounded more like, “Well, who else was supposed to do it?”

A person can then grow used to the idea that a heavy workload is not something worth noticing or taking into account. It simply belongs in the category of “normal.”

As an adult, they may be objectively exhausted and still believe that they are not trying hard enough because their internal standard for how much one should be able to endure without complaining has been sitting somewhere in the stratosphere for years.

What is anxiety, anyway?

Anxiety is an enormous subject, and I’m certainly not trying to explain every mechanism behind it in one article, so here I’m only looking at one possible aspect.

To simplify it considerably, anxiety is often made up of imagined futures: something has not happened yet, but we believe that it might.

Sometimes that future is very specific: I’m going to lose my job, my partner is going to leave, my child will get sick, the test results will be bad. Sometimes it does not even take the form of words and simply exists as an unpleasant feeling that “something is going to happen.”

And interestingly, an anxious mind does not usually imagine that around the next corner there is a van giving away free ice cream. It is much more likely to imagine a serial killer, a falling brick or an email informing you that you have just been fired.

So the interesting question is why our imagined futures become negative so easily.

“What if I can’t cope?”

A useful place to start is by looking around and asking what is already happening to me right now.

One part of anxiety may have less to do with the danger itself and more to do with how capable a person feels of dealing with it.

There is a significant difference between thinking, “Yes, unpleasant things can happen in life, but if something happens, I’ll deal with it step by step,” and thinking, “If one more thing happens, I genuinely won’t cope.”

When someone is exhausted, it is much harder to experience themselves as strong, steady and capable, so a future problem can begin to feel not merely unpleasant but potentially catastrophic.

Then a vicious circle appears: the fewer resources I have, the more anxious I become about possible new problems, while the anxiety itself consumes even more of those resources. Put very simply, if I am already running on empty and barely keeping everyday life functioning, then I may genuinely be afraid that the next problem will be the thing that finally knocks me over.

That is why the answer to the sacred Google question “what to do about anxiety” does not necessarily begin with a breathing exercise or even with digging through childhood. Sometimes it starts with an honest look at how exhausted a person already is and how much they are currently trying to carry.

What if the world around you really is frightening?

We also need to remember that objective reality exists and cannot simply be ignored, particularly when we are talking about Ukrainians.

A person may be anxious not because their mind has invented danger where none has ever existed, but because they already have direct experience of very bad things actually happening.

A war began, they had to leave home, someone close to them became ill, someone lost their job, a missile hit nearby, friends stayed in a dangerous city, relatives are serving in the military, and sometimes a message arriving on their phone in the morning really does contain the news they were afraid of.

At that point, imagined danger is no longer being produced inside a completely safe vacuum. The brain has enough real evidence to say, “See? I told you things can happen.”

Then there is the information environment, which provides us with new alarming scenarios every day, even when nothing particularly critical has happened in our own life that particular day.

What if Olha had always lived in Madeira?

Now imagine the same Olha in a completely different context.

She was born in Madeira and has lived there all her life. In the morning she goes into the mountains and watches cows wandering through the mist, then she calmly gets on with her work, goes swimming in the ocean in the evening, and the people around her are not checking Telegram every fifteen minutes because Shahed drones are flying towards the neighbouring region again.

Does that mean people in Madeira never experience anxiety? Of course not.

But if the environment around Olha were considerably safer and more predictable, the number of threatening scenarios it fed her nervous system every day would probably be smaller.

Our nervous system does not exist separately from the world around us, so expecting ourselves to remain completely calm in an objectively unstable environment is a little like going outside without a coat and then wondering why we feel cold.

Maybe the question needs to change

When people ask “why am I always anxious?”, they often expect there to be one specific cause that they can identify, fix and then finally return to normal.

Sometimes there is one clear cause, but very often anxiety is more like a wedding cake, made up of several layers at once: exhaustion, uncertainty, loss of familiar support systems, constant adaptation, previous negative experiences and very real threats.

So instead of asking, “Why am I anxious when everything is fine?”, it can sometimes be more useful to ask:

“What exactly am I calling ‘fine’, and how much energy does it actually take me to keep this ‘fine’ going?”

One important point: if anxiety has become so persistent that you are sleeping badly, cannot relax, avoid more and more things, spend hours going over possible scenarios in your head or notice that your life is increasingly organised around trying to prevent something bad from happening, then congratulations, the moment when it may be worth asking when to see a therapist for anxiety has probably already arrived.

You do not have to wait until things become unbearable, because anxiety can be worked with even when life looks perfectly normal from the outside while, on the inside, you remain fairly convinced that whatever is waiting around the next corner definitely isn’t ice cream.