Is Anxiety Useful? Stop Trying to Eliminate It.
Updated: Oct 1
Oct 1, 2026 · @AlbinaAra
Is anxiety useful?
Anxiety is useful when it helps you prepare. It is the brain's way of predicting possible problems under uncertainty so you can act before they arrive. It becomes harmful when prediction stops leading to action and turns into overthinking, avoidance, or numbing. The goal is not zero anxiety. The goal is anxiety that moves you.
A slightly offensive theory about anxiety
I sometimes joke that anxiety is a smart-person problem. Stupidos sleep. Meanwhile, the anxious person is awake at 2:13 in the morning investigating why somebody texted "okay" instead of "okay!"
Was it a normal okay or an angry okay? Did I do something? Should I answer now or wait so I do not look desperate? Within about three minutes, one missing exclamation point has become proof that everyone you know has quietly agreed to exile you. Impressive work for a brain that was supposed to be asleep.
Science will not let me keep the joke as stated. Anxiety does not prove you are smarter than anyone, and the research on intelligence and worry is genuinely mixed (more on that below). But the joke points at something real. Anxiety runs on one of the most advanced skills a human brain has, which is the ability to imagine a future that does not exist yet. That skill can make you brilliant at planning. It can also make you absolutely miserable, and the difference between those two outcomes is what this essay is about.
Why do humans feel anxiety?
Anxiety is largely the brain's response to uncertainty about a possible threat. Neuroscientists Dan Grupe and Jack Nitschke, in a 2013 review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, describe anxiety as tied closely to uncertainty and anticipation. When we do not know whether something bad will happen, when it will happen, or how bad it will be, the brain works harder to predict and prepare.
That is a reasonable design. If you know it will rain at 3:00, you bring an umbrella. If you know the exam is Friday, you study, and if your boss wants the report tomorrow, you finish the report. Prediction is an advantage because it lets you change what happens before the future arrives.
Psychologists Beyon Miloyan, Adam Bulley, and Thomas Suddendorf argue that human anxiety is deeply connected to our capacity to think beyond the present moment. We can picture threats that have not happened and act now because of them. It is an extraordinary ability. It is also how your brain ends up worrying about retirement while you are brushing your teeth.
Here is a finding that genuinely surprised me. In a 2016 study in Nature Communications, researchers at University College London had volunteers play a game about guessing which rocks hid snakes, with a small electric shock standing in for the snake bite. Stress, measured by self-report, pupil size, and sweat, peaked when the chance of a shock was 50 percent. It was lowest when people knew for certain that a shock was coming or that it was not. In other words, knowing something bad will happen can be less stressful than not knowing. And here is the part that matters for this essay: the people whose stress most closely tracked the uncertainty were better at predicting when the shocks would come.
What does anxiety do in the body?
Anxiety is not only happening in your thoughts, because your body joins the meeting. When the brain decides something important might happen, the autonomic nervous system can raise your heart rate, change your breathing, tighten your muscles, sharpen your alertness, and mobilize energy for action. That is extremely useful in an actual emergency.
It is less convenient when the emergency is an email that says, "Do you have a few minutes to talk tomorrow?" Your boss has typed nine words. Your body is preparing for Normandy.
The phrase "fight or flight" is older than most people realize. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon described this emergency response in 1915, after years of studying how animals' bodies changed under fear and rage. More than a century later, your body is still running his emergency program, even when the predator is an inbox.
A 2020 brain imaging study of 99 adults by Juyoen Hur, Alexander Shackman, and colleagues in The Journal of Neuroscience found that waiting for a threat with uncertain timing engages a distributed set of brain regions involved in attention, anticipation, and defensive responding. In other words, there is no single anxiety button in the brain. It behaves more like a team, and the trouble begins when the whole team keeps showing up for work even though nobody can say what the emergency is.
Is some anxiety good for you?
This is where I disagree with the idea that the healthiest person is the calmest person in every situation. If I have an exam tomorrow, I want enough concern to study. If my business is losing money or my health is changing, I want enough concern to look at the numbers and make the appointment. Being relaxed about everything would not make me enlightened. It might just make me unprepared.
One of the oldest ideas in psychology supports a middle position. In 1908, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published the study behind what became the Yerkes-Dodson law, usually drawn as an elegant upside-down U: too little arousal and performance is poor, a moderate amount and it improves, too much and it falls apart again. The original experiment was less elegant. It involved mice learning to choose between two boxes while the researchers adjusted the strength of an electric shock. Psychology had an interesting childhood.
The even better fact is that the famous law is partly a later invention. As psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen pointed out, the word "arousal" does not appear in the 1908 paper at all. Decades later, researchers reinterpreted a study about shock strength and learning in mice as a universal law of stress and performance, and the beautiful curve became famous mostly after the fact.
Modern research shows the curve is not a universal law, because the effect depends heavily on the task and the person. The basic lesson still holds up as a rule of thumb: more pressure is not always better, and zero pressure is not always better either.
I find it useful to think of anxiety as a gas pedal. Too little gas and the car never leaves the driveway. The right amount and you move. Too much gas while your other foot is pressing the brake, and the engine screams, the car shakes, and somehow you are still sitting in the same spot. From the outside, a severely anxious person can look like they are doing nothing. Inside, the brain is working a twelve-hour shift of planning, replaying, checking, researching, and asking six different people for an opinion because the first three did not deliver the magical level of certainty it was hoping for.
When does anxiety become a problem?
Anxiety becomes a problem when prediction replaces action. Imagine two students worried about the same exam. The first thinks, "I could fail this," and opens her notes. Her anxiety predicted a possible future and pushed her to prepare for it.
The second thinks the same thing, and then keeps going. What if I fail? Will I lose my scholarship? What will my family say? What if I picked the wrong career, and what if I am actually not smart enough for any of this? Three hours later she has studied for eleven minutes.
Both students felt anxiety, but only one of them used it. That is the central idea of this essay. Healthy anxiety should eventually turn into behavior, so that prediction becomes preparation and preparation becomes action. When prediction only produces more prediction, the system starts eating itself.
The question I keep coming back to is not "How anxious am I?" but "What is this anxiety making me do next?" The feeling alone tells you surprisingly little. What it produces tells you almost everything.
One of my favorite findings on this comes from Penn State. In a 2020 study, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman asked 29 people with generalized anxiety disorder to write down their worries and then track what actually happened. About 91 percent of the worries never came true, and the most common result for an individual participant was that none of their worries came true. It is a small study, so I would not treat 91 as a universal number. But it captures something important. The anxious brain is an enthusiastic forecaster with a terrible track record, and in that study, the people who saw more of their worries turn out false improved more in treatment.
Are anxious people smarter?
No, not in any simple sense, and science has unfortunately ruined my favorite joke. The evidence points in different directions depending on who is studied.
A small 2012 study by Jeremy Coplan and colleagues found that among people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, more worry was associated with higher intelligence, while in healthy volunteers the pattern ran the other way. The sample was small, so it is an interesting signal rather than a conclusion. A study of young adolescents by Francis and colleagues found that higher verbal intelligence was linked to lower intolerance of uncertainty, which in turn predicted less worry. And a nine-year study of roughly 2,600 adults by Nur Hani Zainal and Michelle Newman found that weaker executive functioning and other cognitive difficulties predicted later generalized anxiety disorder.
So the research is messy, which is normal, because human beings tend to ruin clean little theories. The more defensible idea is this: a mind that generates possibilities quickly can point that ability toward solutions or toward threats. The brain that sees five possible solutions can also see five possible disasters. Thinking ten steps ahead can make someone an excellent strategist, and it can also destroy an entire Wednesday over something that never happens. Same ability, different direction.
Why do anxious people reach for escape?
Imagine your brain has spent the whole day predicting problems about money, work, children, health, the relationship, everything you should have said yesterday, and everything you might have to say tomorrow. Eventually you are exhausted. Then you find something that makes the noise quieter, whether that is weed, alcohol, food, video games, porn, shopping, scrolling, or Netflix, and for a while your brain finally shuts up.
Of course that feels good. You do not need a psychology degree to understand why people repeat whatever gives them relief. But there is an important difference between relief and resolution. Relief makes the feeling go away for an hour. Resolution changes the thing the feeling was about. Most escape behaviors deliver the first and quietly postpone the second.
Can cannabis help anxiety?
Some people clearly use cannabis to cope with anxiety, and it is easy to see why. If your mind will not stop producing possible futures and something finally quiets it, your brain learns a simple lesson: that worked, do it again. The clinical evidence is much weaker than the popularity suggests. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry by Black and colleagues found very low quality evidence that cannabinoids improve anxiety symptoms. Dose matters too. In a controlled laboratory study of 42 adults, Emma Childs and colleagues found that a low dose of THC reduced stress during a stressful public speaking and math task, while a slightly higher dose increased negative mood.
That helps explain why cannabis calms some people and makes others paranoid. And either way, the exam, the bank account, and the difficult conversation are still waiting.
Why do I scroll when I am anxious?
You do not need a substance, because you already own an extremely efficient distraction machine. Anxiety shows up, you pick up your phone, and suddenly you are watching someone cook pasta, someone scream about politics, a dog wearing shoes, and a stranger organizing a refrigerator you will never see in your life. Forty minutes disappear and your original problem is exactly where you left it. A 2017 systematic review by Jon Elhai and colleagues found consistent links between problematic smartphone use and anxiety, though the direction is unclear. Phones may not simply cause anxiety. Anxious people may also reach for them to regulate distress.
Is gaming a form of avoidance?
Real life has terrible user design. There is no progress bar above your marriage, nobody tells you that you have completed 67 percent of parenting, and your career never flashes LEVEL UP. Sometimes you do everything right and still lose. Video games are kinder: clear rules, clear goals, visible progress, and enemies you can actually identify. Honestly, I sometimes wish difficult people walked around with a red health bar above their heads. It would save time.
Gaming itself is not the problem, since it can offer enjoyment, challenge, connection, and genuine stress relief. A systematic review of 26 studies by Melodia, Canale, and Griffiths found that problematic gaming is closely tied to escape motives and avoidant coping, though the authors note that few long-term studies exist to show which causes which. The question for all three examples is the same: are you resting, or are you disappearing? Sometimes the answer is both, because humans rarely fit into clean boxes. The more interesting question is what happens inside you right before you want to escape.
Why does avoidance feel so good?
Avoidance feels good because it works, at least at first. If something scares you and you avoid it, you feel better immediately, and that relief teaches your brain a lesson it learns very well: excellent decision, do that again next time. This is negative reinforcement, and it is one of the most reliable learning mechanisms we have.
Tom Ball and Lisa Gunaydin describe avoidance as a normal survival behavior that becomes maladaptive when threat is overestimated or when safe situations are avoided again and again. Stefan Hofmann and Aleena Hay add a useful counterweight: avoidance is not automatically bad, and avoiding a genuine danger is simply intelligent. The real question is whether the avoidance is protecting you or slowly shrinking your life.
Psychology has an old and slightly heartbreaking demonstration of how avoidance keeps itself alive. In the early 1950s, Harvard researchers Richard Solomon, Leon Kamin, and Lyman Wynne trained dogs to jump a barrier when a warning signal appeared, to avoid a shock. The dogs learned fast, and soon they always jumped in time and never felt the shock again. Then the researchers switched the shock off, and the dogs kept jumping anyway, trial after trial. They never stayed long enough to discover the danger was gone, so the avoidance kept protecting them from a threat that no longer existed. I have not found a cleaner picture of what avoidance does to people.
Shrinking is usually how it goes. You avoid speaking up because you might embarrass yourself, and eventually you avoid leadership. You avoid dating because someone could reject you, and eventually you avoid intimacy. You avoid the bank account because the numbers scare you, and the numbers get worse. You avoid the doctor because you fear bad news, and the uncertainty only grows. At some point, the thing that made you feel safer is the thing making your world smaller.
Does anxiety affect health and longevity?
This is where psychology becomes much bigger than "How do I feel today?" Anxiety reaches the body through ordinary, specific pathways. It disrupts sleep. It changes eating. It makes people more likely to drink, smoke, use cannabis, overwork, isolate, stop exercising, or put off medical care because they would rather not know. Chronic stress also activates the body's stress systems repeatedly over long periods.
The long-term data are consistent with that picture, with important limits. A 2010 meta-analysis by Annelieke Roest and colleagues in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, pooling about 250,000 people, found that anxiety was associated with roughly a 26 percent higher risk of developing coronary heart disease. That is a correlation, not proof that worry causes heart disease, and behavior likely explains part of it. Thoughts do not directly cause illness, and it would be irresponsible to say so. But the mind and body were never separate departments.
This is one reason I care so much about psychology and longevity together. We spend enormous energy trying to extend the life of the body. I am equally interested in who will be living inside that body. What is the point of adding years if the person living them is terrified, disconnected, numbing out, or trapped inside an identity they hate? Living longer is not enough. The life has to be worth extending.
How can anxiety shape who you become?
This part interests me more than symptom reduction. Every time anxiety shows up, you do something in response, and over time those responses start teaching you something about yourself. Feel anxious and cancel, and your brain files away "I cannot handle this." Ask for reassurance one more time, and it learns "I cannot trust myself." Get high every time the feeling arrives, and the lesson becomes "I need something outside of me to survive my own mind."
Psychology has two well-established ideas that help explain why. Daryl Bem's self-perception theory proposes that people partly infer who they are by watching what they do, much the way we judge other people. And Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy found that the strongest source of belief in your own capability is mastery experience, meaning the evidence of having actually done the difficult thing.
So picture a different pattern. You feel anxious, you prepare, you act, and you survive. The outcome may not even be good. But your brain receives a new piece of evidence that says "I can handle discomfort." Repeat that enough times and you are no longer only managing anxiety. You are building a different relationship with yourself.
History offers a famous example, with a twist. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, finishing in 3:59.4. Just 46 days later, Australian runner John Landy ran it even faster. The popular version says everyone believed the four-minute mile was impossible until Bannister proved otherwise, and then belief changed overnight. That version is exaggerated, since several runners had been closing in on the mark for years. But the honest version is still useful to me. Years of training built the capability, and one run supplied the evidence. Evidence about what is possible, especially evidence produced by our own behavior, is what changes how we see ourselves.
This is where my interest in identity reconstruction begins. I do not think identity is only something buried inside us waiting to be discovered. My working hypothesis is that it may be less like a hidden object and more like a structure we continually reinforce through what we repeatedly practice, tolerate, avoid, and do. That is a far more interesting question than "How do I calm down?"
What Apollo 13 shows about useful alarm
On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13 roughly 200,000 miles from Earth. The crew began losing oxygen, electrical power, and water. This was not a missing exclamation point. It was a problem that could actually kill three people.
The useful response was not "everybody calm down," and it was not fourteen hours of imagining every way the astronauts could die. Mission Control turned alarm into questions: what still works, what is failing, what can we control, and what has to happen next? The crew moved into the lunar module and used it as a lifeboat, rationing power and water.
My favorite detail is the carbon dioxide problem. The command module's air filters were square and the lunar module's sockets were round, so as carbon dioxide built up, engineers on the ground improvised an adapter from materials the astronauts actually had on board, including plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape, then talked the crew through building it. Literally a square peg in a round hole, solved under pressure.
Apollo 13 was not an anxiety study, and I am not presenting it as evidence. I use it because it shows the sequence I care about. Concern became preparation, and preparation became action. That is what the system is for.
How do you use anxiety instead of fighting it?
The sequence I personally find most useful is prediction, preparation, action, and release. It is my own working approach rather than a validated clinical protocol, but each step maps onto the mechanisms above.
Prediction: name the actual fear
Ask what exactly you are afraid might happen. "Something feels wrong" is not a prediction. "I am afraid I will freeze during the presentation," "I am afraid I cannot cover my bills," and "I am afraid this symptom is serious" are predictions. Once the fear has a shape, you have something real to work with.
Preparation: do what is reasonable
Ask whether there is anything reasonable you can do about it. Practice the presentation, open the bank account, book the appointment, gather enough information, or learn the missing skill. Notice the word enough, because anxious brains love to treat preparation as an infinite project.
Action: let preparation become behavior
This is where anxious brains most often get stuck, because thinking feels safer than moving. At some point you have enough, and then you send the email, make the call, walk into the room, apply, or say no. Bandura's research suggests this is the step that changes how capable you believe you are, because only action produces evidence.
Release: stop demanding certainty
Once you have prepared and acted, stop asking the future for a guarantee it cannot give. There will always be another possible outcome your brain can invent. Your job is not to predict every future. It is to prepare reasonably for the future you can see, and then live.
Borrow ten seconds of courage
Anxiety loves giant projects like "become confident" or "stop caring what people think." Marketer Jay Schwedelson offers a much more practical idea in his talks: borrow bravery for just ten seconds. Ten seconds to hit send, introduce yourself, or ask for the opportunity. You do not need enough courage for the next ten years. You need enough for the next ten seconds, and then another ten if necessary.
Is calm always the goal?
I think we may be framing this backward. Calming yourself can be genuinely useful, especially when your body is so activated that you cannot think. But calm should not always be the final destination. Sometimes calm is simply what makes action possible.
There is a big difference between "I calmed myself so I could keep avoiding the thing" and "I calmed myself enough to deal with the thing." The first uses calm as an escape. The second uses calm as a tool, and that is the one I am interested in.
This gives us a simple way to sort anxiety into three levels. Too little, and nothing feels important enough to prepare for, so you stay comfortable and possibly careless. A useful amount, and you notice risk, prepare, act, and move on once the work is done. Too much, and prediction feeds more prediction until you become paralyzed, dependent on reassurance, or desperate to turn the feeling off with whatever escape is nearby. The target is not zero. The target is useful.
Frequently asked questions about anxiety as a tool
Can anxiety be a good thing?
Yes, in moderate amounts and in the right situations. Anxiety helps people anticipate uncertain threats and prepare for them. It becomes harmful when it is excessive, persistent, out of proportion to the real risk, or starts interfering with daily life.
Does anxiety mean I am smart?
No. Some studies find links between intelligence and worry in specific groups, such as people with generalized anxiety disorder, while others suggest higher cognitive ability may protect against worry. The relationship is mixed and should not be read as an IQ test.
Why does uncertainty make anxiety worse?
Uncertainty makes preparation harder. When the brain cannot tell what will happen, when, or how bad it will be, it keeps searching for information and generating possible outcomes, which raises anxiety rather than settling it.
Why do I overthink instead of taking action?
Overthinking can feel like working on a problem without the risk of acting. The trouble is that more prediction is not the same as more preparation. Once you have reasonable information, further thinking usually adds worry, not clarity.
Why does avoiding things make anxiety worse over time?
Avoidance removes distress quickly, and that relief teaches the brain to avoid again. Over time, safe or important situations get avoided too, so the person never collects evidence that they can cope, and their world gets smaller.
Does cannabis help with anxiety?
Some people report relief, but systematic reviews find very low quality evidence that cannabinoids treat anxiety. Higher doses of THC can increase anxiety or paranoia, and short-term relief does not resolve the underlying problem. Speak with a medical professional before using it for anxiety.
Are video games or scrolling bad for anxiety?
Not inherently. Both can offer genuine rest and enjoyment. Research links problems mainly to escapist use, meaning reaching for the game or phone automatically to avoid uncomfortable feelings or responsibilities.
How do I know if my anxiety is helping or hurting me?
Look at what it makes you do next. If it helps you identify a realistic problem, prepare, act, and move forward, it is likely useful. If it produces endless worry, checking, avoidance, or numbing without meaningful action, it is working against you.
Do most worries come true?
Usually not. In a small 2020 study of people with generalized anxiety disorder, about 91 percent of tracked worries did not come true. The exact number will vary from person to person, but writing worries down and checking the outcomes can show you how often your brain overestimates the danger.
When should I get help for anxiety?
Consider an evaluation by a qualified mental health or medical professional if anxiety is severe, lasts for weeks, keeps getting worse, or interferes with work, relationships, sleep, or daily life.
Not fearlessness. Control.
I do not want to become a person who never feels anxiety. I want something better than that. I want to understand my own brain well enough to know when anxiety is warning me, when it is motivating me, when it is lying to me, and when it has already finished its job.
That matters to me because psychology is not only about reducing symptoms. It is about what kind of person we are building, and what kind of mind we are building for the body to carry. There is not much point in chasing longevity if we spend the extra years afraid to live, or in building enormous success if we are too anxious to enjoy it.
So back to the person awake at 2:13 in the morning, studying the word "okay." Her brain is not malfunctioning. It is a powerful prediction machine that has lost track of when to stop, and what it needs is not silence but a decision: we have thought enough, and now we move. Anxiety may be one of the most useful tools we have, once we stop letting the tool use us.
Research referenced
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About the author
Albina Ara, Graduate Counseling Psychology Student, Identity, Trauma and Human Performance, Supervised Clinical Practice. Albina writes about how human beings rebuild the self, from nervous-system survival to identity, performance, and meaning.
Educational content only. This article does not diagnose or treat any mental health condition. If anxiety is severe, persistent, worsening, or interfering with daily life, consider an evaluation by a qualified mental health or medical professional.
© 2026 Albina Ara. All rights reserved. You are welcome to quote brief excerpts with credit to Albina Ara and a link to the original article on AlbinaAra.com.
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