It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that—even after years of sobriety, even while outwardly functioning—I was completely out of my mind. Not in the way we typically think of insanity, but in a subtler, more dangerous way. I was taken over by anxiety.
I want to explain that word—anxiety—because it’s not what most people think it is.
For a long time, when I heard someone talk about anxiety, I’d picture a person panicking, hyperventilating, paralyzed by fear. And sure, that’s one face of it. But anxiety wears many masks. It can look like confidence. It can look like charm. It can look like success.
You’ll find anxiety in the most unexpected places—in the polished executive, the high-performing athlete, the beloved pastor, the overachieving student, the therapist, the school teacher, the artist, the contractor, the real estate mogul, the TikTok star. You can find it in the people who are celebrated, admired, envied. Anxiety isn’t just panic. It's the underlying hum of restlessness, the inability to be fully present, the tension that never quite leaves the body. It's the relentless drive to do more, be more, control more—because to stop feels like death.
That’s the trick: anxiety is not loud. Most of the time, it’s quiet. Familiar. Invisible. It’s the baseline.
I didn’t know I was anxious because it was all I had ever known. Somewhere in childhood, anxiety took root. I didn’t have the language to name it. I didn’t have a model to show me what peace looked like. I had no concept that what I was living with wasn’t normal—it was just normal for me. Eventually, that state of tension became my chemistry. My identity. My default.
And here's the part that I really want you to hear:
Recovery—true recovery—is not just about quitting a substance or a behavior. That’s step one. The real work, the soul work, is learning how to relax the mind. To down-regulate the nervous system. To create enough inner stillness that you can finally hear your own breath again. That’s the real healing. Everything else we call “self-help” is secondary. It’s the frosting. But without that base layer of nervous system regulation, self-help is often just survival dressed in self-improvement’s clothing. It keeps us going, sure—but it rarely transforms us.
Until we understand the nature of anxiety—how it hijacks our mind, floods our body, distorts our perception—we remain stuck in loops. We read books, take courses, say the affirmations, but the underlying vibration doesn’t change. Because no one taught us how to come back into the body. No one taught us how to truly rest.
Anxiety isn’t a character flaw. It’s biological. It's chemical. It's mechanical. It’s ancient. We inherit it. It’s built into our wiring to help us survive. But in the modern world, where we’re constantly triggered and overstimulated, it no longer protects us—it consumes us. And we don't even know it’s happening.
But here's the good news: the moment we start noticing it, we reclaim our power. When we learn to recognize our triggers—not to judge them, but to meet them with curiosity—we begin the return home. We begin to make space for presence. For calm. For freedom.
You are not broken. You're just wired for survival in a world that never lets you rest.
But you can learn. You can unhook. You can find that still point inside yourself. Not overnight—but moment by moment. Breath by breath.
That’s the journey. And it’s worth everything.