Anxiety About Anxiety: Understanding the Layers of Emotion
Have you ever noticed yourself feeling anxious about feeling anxious — or frustrated with yourself for having a feeling at all?
This is something that comes up again and again in therapy. Often, people aren’t just struggling with their emotions — they’re struggling with how they respond to them.
You might feel frustrated by anxious thoughts or the way anxiety shows up in your body. Angry at yourself for procrastinating or avoiding something important. Disappointed that you keep falling into the same patterns — even when you know better. Over time, those reactions can turn into shame, guilt, or self-doubt.
And before you realize it, most of your energy isn’t going toward the original feeling at all — it’s tied up in managing your reaction to it.
When anxiety about anxiety becomes the real struggle
This is what I think of as the layers.
This layering process can happen with many emotions, but anxiety is often where people notice it most clearly — especially when worry about the feeling itself becomes part of the problem.
It’s hard enough to sit with anxiety, sadness, or fear. But often, we add another layer on top — reacting to the feeling itself. That reaction can pull us further away from the core emotion, rather than helping us understand or address it.
Over time, the layers themselves can become the main problem. What started as a feeling turns into a full-blown cycle of anxiety or low mood, driven less by the original emotion and more by how we’re responding to it.
How secondary emotions build on top of difficult feelings
Our brains are actually trying to help. When something feels uncomfortable, we instinctively look for ways to manage it — to fix it, suppress it, or push it away. In doing so, we layer on coping strategies, reactions, and self-talk that feel protective in the moment — but often keep us stuck.
Eventually, it can feel like peeling an onion, with so many layers that it’s hard to remember what started it all.
How to break the cycle of reacting to your emotions
The first step is awareness. We can’t change a process we don’t notice. Start by paying attention to how you respond when a feeling shows up.
Do you criticize yourself? Try to shut it down? Get angry that it’s there? Worry it will never go away?
Once you notice that response, name it — this is a reaction to a feeling, not the feeling itself.
From there, you have more choice.
Using self-compassion to change your relationship with emotions
Instead of meeting difficult emotions — like anxiety — with frustration or self-attack, it can be helpful to experiment with a different response. Many people I work with notice that approaching emotions with more self-compassion can create space for something to shift.
In fact, pausing and allowing an emotion to exist — without trying to fix it — can be a powerful step in regulation and processing.
From there, it can be helpful to let the feeling take up room — acknowledge that it’s hard, that it makes sense, that other people experience this too, and that your feelings deserve attention rather than resistance.
One way to imagine this is offering gentle comfort to the anxious part of you — like rubbing its back — rather than bracing against it or trying to push it away.
The goal isn’t to make the feeling disappear, but to change your relationship with it.
What happens when you stop fighting your feelings
When we respond this way, we’re more likely to reach the core emotion — and when the core is addressed, there’s less need to pile layers on top of it.
Over time, as the layers thin, people often feel more grounded, more connected to themselves, and more emotionally regulated. The feelings don’t necessarily disappear, but they become easier to hold — and that makes all the difference.
Practicing emotional regulation in daily life
Becoming aware of the layers is an important first step, but insight alone isn’t always enough. Most people need support figuring out how to respond differently in real time — especially when anxiety shows up quickly or feels overwhelming.
This kind of shift often takes practice — especially when emotions move fast.
If you’d like support practicing these ideas, the Anxiety Toolkit I created offers concrete tools for noticing how anxiety shows up — and for changing the responses that tend to pile on extra layers. It’s designed to be used at your own pace, as a way to work with anxiety rather than trying to “fix” it.