Anxiety Makes You Better at Life — Until It Doesn’t

Anxiety gets a bad press.

We talk about it like it’s all panic attacks and sleepless nights.
But here’s the truth most people miss: anxiety can make you brilliant.

It sharpens your senses.
It makes you notice what others miss.
It pushes you to prepare more thoroughly than anyone else in the room.

Some of the most capable, dependable, insightful people you know are running on anxiety.

The upside nobody talks about

Think about it. Anxiety has you scanning for danger — but “danger” isn’t always a tiger in the grass. It can be an awkward silence in a meeting, the faintest change in someone’s tone, the tiny detail in a plan that could go wrong.

You anticipate problems before they happen.
You remember the small things that matter to people.
You rehearse and refine until your work is bulletproof.

From the outside, it looks like talent.
From the inside, it feels like necessity.

When the strength becomes the weakness

The trouble is, a survival skill doesn’t know when to stop.
The same vigilance that makes you effective in a crisis will keep you awake when there’s nothing to fight.

That ability to read the mood in a room?
It turns into overthinking the mood of every text message.

The high standards that make your work exceptional?
They keep moving the finish line so you never feel done.

And here’s the cruel part: the better you get at running on anxiety, the harder it is to imagine who you’d be without it.

The turning point

The question isn’t “how do I get rid of my anxiety?”
It’s “when does it stop serving me?”

There’s a point where the cost outweighs the benefit — where hyper‑preparation becomes procrastination, where empathy becomes emotional exhaustion, where sharpness becomes burnout.

That’s the moment to re‑train your system.
Not to lose the insight, the foresight, the care — but to make sure they’re choices, not compulsions.

Because anxiety can make you better at life.
But it’s not meant to run it for you.

If you’d like to find out more about The STILL Method and how it helps people work with anxiety differently, you can read more here:
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