Anxiety for No Reason: Why It Comes and What Helps Right Now

Nothing happened today. The kids are asleep. The bills are paid, or most of them. You’re on the sofa with a cup of tea going cold, and your chest is humming as if someone just gave you terrible news.

So you go looking for the news. Did I forget something? Is something wrong with my body? Is something about to go wrong? Within a few minutes your mind has found three things to worry about, and now the anxiety has a reason after all.

We’d like to offer you another way to see it. What if the anxiety doesn’t need a reason? What if it’s simply a feeling asking to be felt, and the reasons are what your mind adds afterwards, to explain it?

Why do I feel anxious for no reason?

Start with what a feeling actually is. It isn’t a thought. It’s something in the body: a buzz under the breastbone, a tight stomach, a racing heart, a restlessness in the legs.

The explanation comes later. Our book describes it like this: “The story comes a moment later, from the mind. The mind feels the pressure and rushes to explain it, to find who caused it, to plan how to make it stop.”

So when you feel anxious for no reason, the feeling came first. Your mind just hasn’t found its story yet.

And where does a feeling with no story come from? Often from the past. Feelings we couldn’t feel at the time don’t disappear. They wait in the body. When life is noisy, the noise covers them. When it goes quiet, on a Sunday afternoon, on holiday, on the sofa after the kids are in bed, they finally get their chance to rise.

Our book describes what often happens when people lie still and stop running: “something older starts to rise.” Sometimes it’s “a sadness with no story.” Sometimes it’s “a fear that makes no sense.”

That’s what anxiety for no reason often is. Not a sign that something is about to go wrong. A sign that something old is moving.

Random anxiety: why hunting for a cause makes it louder

When the feeling rises, the mind goes to work. We call that busy part of the mind the dragon. It explains, it worries, it plans, it scans your body for symptoms and your calendar for disasters. It’s very good at its job.

The trouble is, every reason it finds is fuel. You start with a buzz in the chest and end with a full night of worry about your job, your health and your mother.

There’s a picture in our book about this. The thought is like a text message telling you a parcel is at the door. “When the message comes, you don’t sit there rereading it. You go to the door.” Anxious thoughts are the message. The door is your body.

One of the biggest moments in Rytis’s life was the day he heard the voice in his head clearly for the first time. It started a sentence with “I really want,” in his own voice, and he realized it was not him speaking.

Anxious thoughts work the same way. “Something’s wrong.” “I can’t cope.” They sound like you, because they use your voice. That doesn’t make them true, and it doesn’t make them you.

And there’s one more thing, maybe the most useful sentence we know about anxiety: “Anxiety stays alive mostly because of the fear of feeling the anxiety fully.” The running away is what keeps it going.

Feeling anxious all the time

Anxiety for no reason now and then is part of being human. Feeling anxious all the time is different, and we want to be honest about it.

The NHS puts it simply. Most people feel anxious sometimes, and it doesn’t always mean you have an anxiety disorder, but it’s more likely to be generalised anxiety disorder if you feel anxious most of the time and it affects your everyday life. (NHS: Generalised anxiety disorder)

If that sounds like you, please see your doctor. There is real help, and what we describe here can sit alongside it. We are not therapists, and this is not therapy. And if panic keeps coming back, have that checked by a doctor too.

What we can speak to is the feeling itself, and how much of a life gets shaped around avoiding it. Our book says people “shrink their lives around it, avoid people, places, conversations, opportunities, all to avoid a pressure in the chest, a tightness in the breath, a trembling in the body.” The feeling is hard. The running often costs more.

What helps when there’s nothing to fix

Most advice for anxiety is about calming it down. Breathe slower. Think positive. Distract yourself. We don’t do any of that. Calming is one more way of saying “go away,” and the feeling can tell.

People ask us whether they can use our practice to make their anxiety go away. Our answer in the book: “You can try, and you will probably notice that it works best when you stop trying to make it go away. Feel it to meet it, not to get rid of it.”

So there’s nothing to fix. No reason to find, no technique to get right. Your breath can do whatever it does. You only need to be where the feeling is, which is here, in your body, now. “Fear lives in the future. The feeling lives now.”

If it’s humming in your chest right now, you don’t have to work out why. Try this, sitting where you are.

Practice2 min

Say hello, change nothing

1. Don’t go into the thoughts about the anxiety. Go straight to the body.
2. Say hello to what you feel. Change nothing.
3. When you notice resistance, say: “I allow myself to feel what came up.”

What you might notice: the humming may get stronger for a moment, then shift, to the throat, to the belly, somewhere you didn’t expect. It might turn into tears, or into a heavy tiredness. Or it might stay just as it is while you stay with it. None of that means you did it wrong.

You can stop at any moment. Open your eyes, press your feet into the floor, look around the room, and ring someone close if you want a voice nearby.

If that small hello softened something, the book shows you the full way, lying down, for the evenings the humming comes back.

When the humming comes back

• Put the search down. When your mind offers a new reason, say “maybe” and go back to your chest. You don’t have to argue with it.
• Ask one question of the scary thought. “Do I know this one hundred percent, right now?” Then return to the body, not the answer.
• Come back for ten seconds, a few times tomorrow. Close your eyes wherever you are, feel your body, find the strongest sensation, change nothing. Then carry on.
• Notice your pacifier. The phone, the fridge, the glass. When your hand reaches for it, pause for a moment and feel what made it reach.

If it’s worse in the small hours, waking up at 3am with anxiety and how to stop overthinking at night go deeper into the night side. If you wonder what your anxiety might be asking of you, read the spiritual meaning of anxiety. Feeling on edge, stressed or overwhelmed without a clear cause are close relatives of this one, and our states section has a page for each, while the method itself, step by step, is in The Feeling Session.

Some evening soon the tea will go cold again on the same sofa, with the same hum under your breastbone and no news to explain it. The hum doesn’t need a reason from you. You can sit beside it the way you’d sit beside a restless dog before a storm, close by and quiet, asking it nothing.