The Quiet Architecture of Anxiety
Hi Reader,
Been a crazy busy first week back from travels, loads on the go and still doing a lot of work on the backend of the website and newsletter as well as wrapping up details on a pretty amazing PVT trip I'm hosting at the end of November.
So this week, let's get straight into it. Saw the following graphic online, really made me think and then I started writing:
There's this thing that happens when anxiety becomes your baseline.
You stop noticing the architecture.
The small daily choices. The habits you've defended for so long they feel like personality. The patterns you've normalized because everyone around you is normalizing them too.
I work with people navigating these spaces. High performers, mostly. People who've built careers, raised families, achieved things. And I watch them carry anxiety like it's weather. Like it's something that just happens to them, outside their control.
But anxiety isn't weather.
Most of the time, we're building it. One choice at a time.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. About the things I see repeated across dozens of conversations. The habits that show up so consistently I could script them. Not the clinical kind that needs medication because that's real and different. But the kind we're constructing ourselves through how we're choosing to live.
Sleep we keep sacrificing. Comparisons we can't stop making. Work we use to avoid everything else. Bodies we forget to move. Screens we can't put down. Caffeine we're dependent on. Nicotine we pretend helps. News we consume like obligation. Meals we skip. Futures we catastrophize. Water we don't drink. Time for ourselves we never protect.
Twelve things. Some you'll recognize in yourself immediately. Others you've been so close to you can't see them anymore.
None of them alone. All of them compounding.
Let me show you what I mean.
Sleep
You know that feeling when you're running on five hours and everything hurts a little more than it should?
Not dramatic hurt. Just... more. Colors brighter. Sounds sharper. Patience thinner. Someone asks you a simple question and you want to scream.
That's not life being difficult.
That's your nervous system trying to process the world without the one tool it needs most. And you're denying it that tool every single night while wondering why everything feels so hard.
I hear people talk about scrolling until midnight. Call it unwinding. Set three alarms because they don't trust themselves anymore. Drink coffee at 3 PM to push through, which guarantees they'll be wired at 11. Then act surprised when anxiety shows up like an uninvited guest who never leaves.
Sleep deprivation doesn't just make you tired. It makes your brain treat normal situations as emergencies.
The email from your boss that needs nothing becomes a crisis. The conversation with your partner suddenly has subtext that isn't there. You're not seeing reality. You're seeing reality through a lens of exhaustion that distorts everything it touches.
I'm not going to tell you to just go to bed earlier. You already know that.
The question isn't what to do. It's whether you're willing to stop justifying why you don't.
Track how you feel the day after bad sleep. Not just physically. Emotionally. How quickly you get frustrated. How easily you spiral. How much space exists between stimulus and reaction.
The pattern becomes impossible to ignore once you're willing to see it.
Comparison
Someone mentions their promotion at dinner.
In the span of three seconds, you've done the math. Their age. Their salary. The timeline of your own career. You're still sitting at the table but you've left the conversation. Gone somewhere in your head where you're always, always behind.
I see this often. People halfway through achieving something remarkable, unable to feel it because someone else is achieving something different.
LinkedIn at 10 AM. Instagram at lunch. Strangers' highlight reels playing on repeat while you wonder why your behind-the-scenes footage feels so inadequate.
By evening you're exhausted from races nobody asked you to run.
The cruelty of comparison isn't how it makes you feel. It's how invisible it becomes. You don't think "I'm comparing myself right now." You just feel less than and can't locate the source.
What were you doing right before the anxiety spiked?
Phone in your hand? Conversation about someone's success? The pattern has a shape. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Sometimes that means putting your phone in another room. Sometimes it means staying in the actual conversation instead of the one in your head. Sometimes it means admitting that most of what you're anxious about only exists in comparison to lives you're not living and were never meant to.
Work
Overwork feels virtuous in a way other forms of avoidance don't.
You're tired for a good reason. Building something. Needed.
And meanwhile your body is screaming in a language you've taught yourself to ignore.
People answer emails at 9 PM because it's "just quick." Work through lunch because meetings consumed the morning. Go weeks without a real break but can't quite remember when that started.
Sunday night arrives and that pit in your stomach isn't about Monday's workload.
It's about the fact that you never left. That you're carrying all of it, all the time, and you've been calling it dedication when really it might be avoidance.
What are you not dealing with when you work this much?
What conversation are you not having? What feeling are you not sitting with? What part of your life are you neglecting while telling yourself you're building something important?
The work will be there tomorrow. I know that sounds impossible until you actually try it and realize the world didn't end. That maybe your anxiety has less to do with the amount of work and more to do with never getting distance from it.
With never letting yourself just... be.
Movement
Anxiety lives in your body.
The tightness in your chest. The knot in your shoulders. The feeling that you can't quite take a full breath. That's not abstract. That's stored stress looking for somewhere to go, and you keep ignoring the exit.
I hear this a lot:: "I used to work out. I need to get back to it."
But you don't. You stay too tired, too busy, too something.
So the stress accumulates like sediment. Layers on layers until your body becomes a filing cabinet of everything you haven't processed.
Thirty minutes. That's all.
Not because movement is some magic cure, but because it gives your nervous system somewhere to put all that excess energy that's been pooling in your chest. Pressure that needs release.
Walk. Dance in your kitchen. Stretch on your floor. It doesn't matter what it looks like.
What matters is motion. Giving your body permission to release what it's been holding.
Notice how you feel before. Notice how you feel after.
That's not coincidence. That's information.
Social Media
You reach for your phone before you're fully awake.
Not because something happened. Because checking is what you do now. During meals. In line. On the toilet. In the minutes before sleep.
Every scroll is a micro-decision to watch other people's lives instead of building your own.
Every refresh is you checking if you're missing something, which guarantees you'll feel like you are.
I watch people post something and then spend the next hour checking if people liked it. Mood shifting with the numbers. Self-worth outsourced to strangers' thumbs.
Try this: no social media for the first hour after you wake up and the last hour before bed.
Just those two hours.
See what happens to your baseline. See what you do with the quiet. See who you are without the constant input telling you who you should be.
The resistance you feel to that suggestion?
That's exactly what needs examining.
Caffeine
That third coffee isn't giving you energy.
It's masking exhaustion while flooding your nervous system. You're wired and tired simultaneously, which is its own particular kind of hell.
Coffee on an empty stomach at 6 AM after four hours of sleep isn't a morning routine. And you're doing it to yourself every single day.
I'm not suggesting you quit cold on a Tuesday. Caffeine withdrawal is real.
But start noticing the pattern.
Do you actually feel better after that second cup, or just shakier? Are you drinking it because you need it, or because it's 10 AM and that's what you do?
Drink water first. Actual water.
Then see if you need as much caffeine, or if what you thought was tiredness was partly just thirst.
Your anxiety might have less to do with your circumstances and more to do with running your nervous system on high alert all day, every day, because that's what caffeine does.
Nicotine
Stress builds. You step outside. Five minutes of relief. Back inside.
An hour later, stress builds again.
But what's actually happening is this: nicotine is creating the anxiety it's relieving.
You feel stressed because you need nicotine. You use nicotine to feel normal. Then your baseline anxiety increases, so you need more to get back to normal.
The cycle is the problem pretending to be the solution.
Those breaks aren't keeping you sane. They're keeping you dependent.
Track your anxiety on days you can get outside versus days you can't. You're not anxious because of work. You're anxious because you're in withdrawal.
I'm not going to pretend this one's easy to change. It's physically addictive and socially reinforced.
But at minimum, stop lying to yourself about what's happening.
News
You check the news first thing in the morning.
Wars. Disasters. Political chaos. Economic collapse. Before you've even brushed your teeth.
Your nervous system doesn't distinguish between threats happening to you and threats happening in the world. It just registers: danger, danger, danger.
You tell yourself you need to stay informed.
But there's informed and there's immersed. Between knowing what's happening and marinating in every terrible detail six times a day.
You feel helpless because you are. Not in your life. Specifically about the news cycle.
You can't stop the war. You can't fix the economy. But you can feel terrible about both all day long while changing nothing except your own nervous system.
One check per day. That's it.
Get informed, then step away. The world will keep turning. You'll still know what's happening. But you won't be carrying all of it in your body every hour.
Meals
It's 3 PM. You're shaky and irritable and everything feels impossible.
You haven't eaten since breakfast.
You didn't skip intentionally. You just got busy, then busier. Now you're crashing.
Low blood sugar mimics anxiety. The shakiness. Racing heart. Inability to focus. Your body doesn't care about your deadline. It just knows it needs fuel.
Or maybe you're skipping breakfast, running on coffee, eating lunch at your desk while working.
You've normalized this. But normalized isn't the same as normal.
Eat something small every few hours. Not when you have time. Scheduled.
Like meetings. Because your ability to function depends on it, but you've been treating it like an optional activity.
Notice how your mood changes when your blood sugar is stable.
It won't fix everything. But it might fix more than you realize.
Catastrophizing
One small thing goes wrong and your mind builds the entire cascade.
You're not just going to have a difficult conversation. You're going to get fired, lose your apartment, end up alone.
This happens in seconds.
A weird pain isn't indigestion, it's a heart attack. A text that says "can we talk?" isn't about making plans, it's about them being upset with you.
Your brain thinks it's protecting you by preparing for the worst.
Mostly it's just torturing you with fiction.
When you catch yourself doing this - and you will once you start looking for it - ask: what's the actual problem right now?
Not the imagined chain reaction. The real, current thing.
Usually it's so much smaller than the disaster you've constructed around it.
Water
You're tired. Foggy. Anxious.
When did you last drink water? Actual water, not coffee.
Dehydration causes headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating. Increased anxiety.
Your body is mostly water. When you don't give it enough, everything gets harder.
Keep water visible. On your desk. In your car. Next to your bed.
This is possibly the easiest item on this list.
Time for Yourself
Everyone else's needs come first.
Work. Family. Friends. Partner.
You'll get to yourself later. When things calm down.
Things don't calm down.
Meanwhile you're disappearing. The things that actually replenish you - reading, hobbies, time alone, whatever fills your specific tank - keep getting pushed to the bottom of the list that never ends.
You feel resentful but can't quite articulate why. Everyone needs you. You're doing important things.
But you're running on empty and pretending you're not.
Schedule time for yourself like it's a meeting you can't cancel.
Because it is.
If you won't protect your own time, nobody else will. And then you'll resent everyone for taking what you never defended.
The Pattern Beneath the Patterns
None of these exist in isolation.
They compound.
Bad sleep makes you reach for caffeine. Caffeine makes you anxious. Anxiety makes you doomscroll. Doomscrolling keeps you up late.
And around it goes.
But the inverse is also true.
Change one thing and the others start to shift. Better sleep means less need for caffeine. Less caffeine means lower baseline anxiety. Lower anxiety means better sleep.
You don't have to fix everything at once.
Pick one. The one that feels most possible. Tomorrow morning. Not next week.
Your anxiety isn't a character flaw. It's not some mysterious force that just happens to you.
It's built from patterns you can see if you're willing to look.
And patterns you can see are patterns you can change.
But you have to be willing to stop defending them first.
Most people would rather stay comfortable with their discomfort than risk the uncertainty of trying something different. They'd rather analyze why they're anxious than address the daily habits feeding it.
One choice.
One day that's different from yesterday.
That's how this works. Not dramatic, not fast.
Just different.
And different is where change lives.