Understanding Anxiety as Alarm: A New Path to Healing from the Inside Out

Anxiety isn’t just a mental health issue—it’s a physiological state of alarm that often gets misinterpreted as a problem of thinking. We’ve been taught to treat it with thoughts, strategies, and coping tools, but that only takes us so far. True healing begins when we understand anxiety for what it really is: a signal from the body that something deeper needs attention.

Anxiety: The Body’s Alarm System

More and more people are feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and disconnected—and it’s no wonder. We live in a world that’s constantly stimulating our survival responses while simultaneously discouraging us from feeling anything at all. Anxiety is rising not just because we’re thinking too much, but because we’re feeling too little—or rather, we’re disconnected from what we’re feeling.

At its core, anxiety is an alarm. It’s the body’s way of telling us that something, often rooted in old emotional wounds, is unresolved. It’s not a malfunction—it’s a message. And until we understand that message, we’ll stay stuck in the loop of coping, rather than moving toward healing.

The Physical Manifestations of Anxiety

Alarm shows up in the body long before the mind creates anxious thoughts. You might feel it as tightness in your throat, heaviness in your chest, fluttering in your solar plexus, or a clenched belly. These are not just symptoms to manage—they’re signals pointing you toward the root.

When you begin to map where anxiety lives in your body, you can begin to form a relationship with it. And in that relationship, healing becomes possible.

The Gap: Why We Feel So Anxious

A big part of what fuels anxiety is what I call the gap—the space between who we believe we should be and who we feel we are. It’s the distance between your current self and some idealized version of you, usually shaped by cultural standards, social media, or family expectations.

This gap keeps the alarm active. It tells your nervous system that you’re not safe, not enough, not there yet. But here’s the truth: you can’t shame or strive your way out of anxiety. You can only feel your way through it.

Objecting Without Contracting: A New Way to Meet Discomfort

When alarm rises, most of us either resist it or try to rationalize it away. But there’s another way: objecting without contracting. That means allowing the discomfort to be present, while staying open and curious toward it.

It’s a bit like saying, “I don’t love how this feels… but I’m not going to abandon myself because of it.”

This kind of gentle awareness builds nervous system safety. And safety is the soil where healing grows.

Embracing the Alarm: Reconnecting with Your Inner Child 

Behind every anxious adult is a younger self still holding fear, grief, or loneliness they were never equipped to process. When you experience alarm, it’s often this younger part of you who’s being activated.

The work, then, is to reconnect with that part—not through logic, but through presence. To soothe the alarm in your body like you would a child: with warmth, with consistency, and with love.

Healing Through Connection 

Moments of calm are golden opportunities. That’s when your adult self is most available to offer comfort to the alarmed child within. Healing doesn’t mean never feeling anxious again. It means being able to meet the alarm differently—with connection rather than fear.

The more often you can show up for yourself this way, the more your nervous system begins to learn: “I’m not alone anymore. I’m safe now.”

A Final Word

If you’re struggling with anxiety, please know this: it’s not because you’re broken or weak or failing. It’s because your body is still carrying an old alarm it never got to release. And that alarm doesn’t need to be managed—it needs to be met.

Healing is possible. Not through thinking more, but through feeling better supported in your body.

That’s what I teach in my program, MBRX—a mind-body approach to healing anxiety by addressing the alarm at its root. If you’re ready to stop coping and start healing, you can learn more about it here.

You don’t have to keep living with anxiety. You just need a new way to listen to your body—and a path that leads you home.

👉Click here to learn more about MBRX

With loving support,
Dr. Russ