What Anxiety Is Trying to Tell You

Thrown into a bewildering world — suspended between a birth out of nothing and a death back into nothing — we struggle to make sense of an existence that resists sense-making. We intuitively perceive an infinity that both surrounds and permeates us, an eternity whose vastness dwarfs our small temporal lives. This yawning abyss, this eternal night enveloping existence, is what the existentialists — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rollo May among them — identify as the source of anxiety. In this sense anxiety is transcendental: it does not arise from the world but from beyond it. It is not a symptom of circumstance but a condition of consciousness itself.

Which means its complete eradication is both impossible and perhaps beside the point. If anxiety is woven into the fabric of being-in-the-world — if it belongs to any creature aware of its own finitude — then no act of will can dispel it entirely. It is the tremor we feel before the ultimate question of existence, a tension stretched between being and non-being. It asks what life means, and it will not rest until meaning answers.

This does not mean all anxiety is existential in origin, nor that psychological suffering should be romanticised. There are forms of anxiety rooted in trauma, illness, nervous system dysregulation, and material instability that require care, support, and sometimes clinical treatment. But beneath and alongside these, there exists a more fundamental unease — the anxiety that arises not from what has happened to us, but from what we are: beings who are free, finite, and responsible.

Kierkegaard called it the dizziness of freedom. Frankl agreed. Only a being capable of choosing can feel the weight of responsibility. Freedom, in the existential sense, is not freedom from constraint but freedom to — to act, to create, to love, to take a stance toward one’s circumstances. And it is often precisely where this freedom becomes visible that anxiety begins to stir.

Because anxiety frequently appears where life is asking something of us.

Ursula Le Guin once wrote that to light a candle is to cast a shadow. I keep returning to that line. Fear and anxiety may be understood similarly: not simply as signs of weakness or malfunction, but as shadows cast by possibility itself. The greater the possibility, the greater the vulnerability. The more deeply we care, the more we risk. Seen this way, anxiety is not always an obstacle to meaning. Sometimes it is evidence of its presence.

Frankl observed that anxiety tends to intensify within what he called the existential vacuum — the inner emptiness that emerges when a person loses contact with meaning, direction, or genuine participation in life. The less meaningfully we live, the more anxious we tend to become. He used the image of a gauge: the needle rises in proportion to the pressure within the vacuum.

This is not merely a philosophical observation. It is practically useful. When anxiety suddenly intensifies — when the needle climbs without obvious cause — it may help to ask not only what we are afraid of, but what in our life is asking for attention, responsibility, or change. Anxiety, in this sense, can function like a signal. Not infallible. Not to be taken literally in every case. But worth listening to before reaching for the mute button.

The difficulty is that anxiety easily becomes self-reinforcing. The more intently we monitor it, analyse it, resist it, or attempt to force it away, the more consuming it tends to become. Frankl called this hyperreflection: consciousness turning inward upon itself so forcefully that the symptom is amplified through attention alone. Most of us know this dynamic from the inside. The harder you try to fall asleep, the more awake you become.

The existential response is therefore not always to wrestle directly with the anxiety, but to redirect attention — toward life, toward meaning, toward whatever remains possible here and now. A task. A phone call. A chore. Running an errand. Reading a poem. Something that draws the self back into participation rather than self-enclosure.

Frankl distinguished carefully between ultimate meaning — the final why of existence, which may remain permanently beyond us — and the meaning of the moment: the concrete, immediate opportunity to respond to what life is asking right now. We cannot resolve the infinite. But the next truthful action, the next necessary responsibility, is usually close enough to touch.

Anxiety pulls consciousness away from the present — toward imagined futures, unresolved pasts, abstract catastrophes. Meaning pulls it back. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But enough to restore movement.

And in those moments of restored movement, something shifts. Anxiety ceases to be only an experience of paralysis and becomes, instead, part of the tension that accompanies a life being actually lived.

Not a failure of being alive, but one of its inevitable companions.

And perhaps, at times, even one of its teachers.