When you're a woman with anxiety, your life probably looks pretty good from the outside.

You're capable, reliable, and holding everything together. Your calendar is full, you show up for the people who need you, and from where anyone else is standing, you’re pretty much crushing it. 

But on the inside, your anxiety is a dead-end maze full of "what ifs."

Replaying conversations to make sure you didn't say the wrong thing. Saying yes when you mean no. Lying awake with a brain that won't downshift, even though nothing is wrong. Achieving constantly, but never quite feeling like enough.

It's anxiety, and it feels awful.

Anxiety is the bedfellow shaking you awake at 2 AM insisting NOW is a good time to think through everything that went wrong during the day and everything that COULD go wrong tomorrow.

All those worried, ruminative thoughts keep you constantly in your head—spinning out, second-guessing, and working twice as hard as everyone else to maintain the appearance that everything is okay. 

When you're in your head, it's hard to be in your life.

"Why Do I Feel So Anxious?"

Anxiety is like a radio constantly playing at high volume. 

All humans have busy, chattering minds. Women, so used to holding it all together, often have the busiest minds of all. 

Our minds are little thought-generating machines, a trait that can be wildly helpful in many situations.

But with anxiety, it's almost impossible to differentiate the unhelpful radio content from the helpful radio content—it all sounds the same. 

Like an hourly news segment, the anxious mind loves to repeat itself, running through the same thoughts over and over. For many women, the skipping track sounds something like: Did I say the wrong thing? Am I doing enough? Why can't I just relax? Everyone else seems fine.

Anxiety is protective.

One of the jobs of our human mind is to protect us from future pain.

This works well when the potential pain is exterior. It's helpful when the mind says things like "I should look both ways before I cross the street." 

But this protective feature doesn't work as well when it comes to emotional pain. In its quest to shield you from feelings of fear, failure, and uncertainty, the mind goes into overdrive, cataloging everything that could go wrong, every way you might fall short, and every ball you might drop.

This is anxiety in a nutshell—a normal, natural function of our brain, only turned up to eleven. You've been managing this type of anxiety for years while looking completely fine on the outside. 

No wonder you're exhausted. 

You and Anxiety Need Some Space

Anxiety has been your ride-or-die for as long as you can remember. 

You've tried white-knuckling it, outrunning it, and achieving your way around it. And these strategies have worked...up until now. 

It's okay that your best efforts have stopped working. They were always going to, because that's how anxiety functions. 

It's not a you problem. It's an anxiety problem. 

Working with a therapist who understands high-functioning anxiety means finally giving yourself permission to bow out of the performance. 

By working with anxiety in therapy, you'll learn to relate to your anxious mind differently—not by silencing it or arguing with it, but by understanding what it's trying to do and giving it a little less control over your life.

Therapy for anxiety looks like:

• Noticing the thoughts that drive your anxiety without getting swept away by them
  
  
• Learning what anxiety feels like in your body, and how to work with it, not waste your energy fighting against it
  
  
• Getting clear on what you actually want, not what anxiety says you should want
  
  
• Moving toward the life you're after, even when anxiety has opinions about where you're going and what you're doing

This is the heart of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the approach I use most often with women navigating anxiety. It's practical and grounded, and it works particularly well for people who are very good at thinking their way around their feelings—which, if you've read this far, probably sounds familiar.

Anxiety doesn't get to boss you around anymore.