Anxiety as a Detour: What It’s Really Protecting You From

When people say that anxiety is “running from feelings,” they’re not wrong. In fact, that’s often precisely accurate. But it’s also incomplete. Anxiety isn’t simply avoidance—it’s the psyche’s attempt to protect us from feelings that feel too threatening, disorganizing, or unacceptable to face directly.

Instead of experiencing grief, rage, helplessness, or shame head-on, the mind diverts into anxiety. Anxiety becomes the substitute experience—a way of feeling something without having to feel the thing itself.

The Psychoanalytic View: Anxiety as a Signal

Psychoanalytic theory has long recognized anxiety as more than a symptom. It’s a signal.

• Signal anxiety (Freud, 1926): Anxiety warns that something unconscious is pressing too close to the surface and risks overwhelming the ego.

• In this sense, anxiety isn’t random—it’s a flare. It tells us that defenses are straining, that something deeper is trying to make itself known.

The anxious person may not know what they’re avoiding, but the anxiety itself says: something is bubbling up.

Common Emotional Substitutes for Anxiety

What often presents as anxiety is actually a stand-in for something else:

• Anger that can’t be expressed → becomes generalized tension or panic.

• Grief that isn’t processed → morphs into restlessness or dread.

• Shame that is disowned → transforms into social anxiety.

• Desire that feels dangerous → reappears as compulsive worry.

In each case, anxiety is doing double duty: it’s protecting us from overwhelming feelings while signaling that something underneath still needs attention.

In Simple Terms

Yes—people with anxiety are often running from feelings. But rarely on purpose.

It’s not: “I won’t feel this.”
It’s: “Something’s wrong,” without knowing what or why.

Anxiety is the nervous system’s attempt to point toward something unspoken, even if it doesn’t yet have language.

The Caveat

This doesn’t mean anxiety isn’t real or serious. It is very real—a genuine experience of internal conflict.

But the solution isn’t always about suppressing or managing the anxiety itself. Often, the deeper work is tracing anxiety back to its source, locating the feeling it is standing in for, and carefully allowing that feeling into awareness.

Because when the original emotion is felt and integrated, the anxiety often has no job left to do.