Why Accepting Anxiety Is Better Than Controlling It

The Difference Between External and Internal Anxiety

Before we dive deeper, let’s clarify an important distinction. There are two primary types of anxiety:

1. Externally generated anxiety – This is when you feel anxious about something specific outside yourself: an upcoming exam, conflict with a neighbor, or stress at work.
2. Internally generated anxiety – This is being anxious about being anxious. Your focus shifts to the anxiety itself—the scary thoughts, physical sensations, and discomfort become the main concern.

The second type is what we refer to as chronic or disordered anxiety, which might manifest as panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, health anxiety, or other forms. This is where the acceptance vs. control discussion becomes crucial.

Why Control Strategies Often Backfire

When scrolling through social media, you’ll encounter countless approaches for managing anxiety:

• Counting techniques
• Special breathing methods
• Tapping exercises
• Ice packs
• “Vagus nerve activation”
• Grounding techniques
• Trigger avoidance

These control-based strategies might seem logical. After all, if something feels bad, shouldn’t you try to make it stop?

The problem is that when dealing with chronic, internally generated anxiety, these approaches often:

1. Only provide short-term relief
2. Require constant repetition
3. Reinforce the belief that anxiety is dangerous and must be controlled
4. Can actually increase anxiety in the long run

The Evidence Behind Acceptance-Based Approaches

It’s not just my opinion that acceptance works better—the evidence strongly supports this conclusion:

1. Research data: Acceptance and mindfulness-based approaches consistently show better long-term outcomes and lower relapse rates than control-based strategies.
2. Evidence-based treatments: The most empirically validated treatments for anxiety disorders rely on acceptance principles (ACT, third-wave CBT approaches, ERP therapy).
3. Real-world experience: When I asked my Instagram audience (91,000 followers) about the most valuable principles in their anxiety recovery, the overwhelming majority pointed to acceptance-based strategies like “willful tolerance,” “floating,” “surrendering,” and “not fighting.”

Many reported having to learn or shift toward acceptance after trying control strategies without success. Some even discovered this accidentally when forced to endure anxiety in situations where they couldn’t escape or use their usual safety behaviors.

What Accepting Anxiety Actually Means

Accepting anxiety doesn’t mean:

• Liking it
• Giving up
• Resigning yourself to suffering forever
• Accepting actual danger or threat

Instead, acceptance means:

• Acknowledging that your internal states aren’t designed to be manually controlled
• Recognizing that feeling threatened doesn’t mean you are threatened
• Understanding that your body and mind are doing exactly what they’ve evolved to do
• Learning that you can handle uncomfortable experiences without trying to fix or stop them

The Paradox of Accepting Anxiety

Here’s the fascinating paradox: When you stop trying to prevent or control anxiety and instead learn to accept it, the anxiety often begins to lose its power over you.

Through repeated experiences of allowing anxiety to be present without fighting it, your brain gradually learns that these sensations and thoughts, while uncomfortable, aren’t actually dangerous. The threat detection system in your brain recalibrates when it sees evidence that you can handle anxiety without needing to escape or control it.

This isn’t an instant fix—it takes practice, patience, and courage—but it offers a path to genuine, lasting change rather than temporary symptom management.

The Challenge of Combining Approaches

Many people try to adopt both acceptance and control strategies simultaneously: “I’ll accept my anxiety… while also carrying my ice pack and doing my calming techniques just in case.”

The problem is that these approaches fundamentally contradict each other. You’re either allowing the experience or you’re not. You’re either dropping resistance or you’re still resisting.

Control strategies, even when used alongside acceptance language, are ultimately forms of avoidance that can interfere with the learning process necessary for recovery.

Taking the First Step Toward Acceptance

If you’ve been struggling with anxiety for a while and feel stuck in a cycle of management techniques and temporary relief, consider whether a shift toward acceptance might help. This doesn’t mean abandoning all your coping strategies overnight, but perhaps beginning to question whether trying to control your internal experiences is really serving you well in the long run.

Remember that this shift isn’t easy. Almost everyone resists the idea of acceptance at first because it seems counterintuitive. Why would you accept something that feels so terrible?

But as countless people who have recovered from anxiety disorders can attest, learning to work with anxiety rather than against it can be transformative. It opens the door to a different relationship with your internal experiences—one where you’re no longer at war with your own mind and body.

Links Of Interest

• Find my “Practical Mindfulness for Anxiety Recovery” Groups
• My Panic Attacks Explained Workshop
• My Agoraphobia Explained Workshop
• My Panic and Agoraphobia Recovery Guidebook
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.