Why Do I Feel Anxious for No Reason?
“For no reason” usually means “no reason I can explain”
When people say “for no reason”, they usually mean “for no reason I can explain.” The feeling is real, but the story won’t come. You wake up tense. Your chest is tight. Your mind starts scanning, searching for what you’ve missed. Nothing obvious appears, and that blankness becomes its own kind of threat.
Anxiety isn’t always like fear
Anxiety isn’t always like fear. Fear points at something. Anxiety often doesn’t. It can be the sense that something is wrong without being able to name what. In that situation the mind does what it’s designed to do: it tries to locate an object. It checks your body, your work, your relationships, your future, your past. And if it can’t find the “cause”, it turns inward and starts suspecting you. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just relax?
The body can be ahead of your words
Sometimes the body is simply ahead of your words. A small shift in a relationship. A comment that landed badly. A pressure you keep brushing aside. A decision you’re not making. A part of you that’s tired of performing competence. You can carry those things without consciously registering them, until you stop, and then the anxiety arrives like a bill that was always due.
What anxiety can be signalling
From a psychoanalytic angle, anxiety can be a signal that your usual ways of keeping things manageable are slipping. Many people live by staying busy, staying useful, staying switched on. When life gets quieter, or when something you’ve kept at a distance comes a little closer, you feel exposed. Lacan’s point is useful here: anxiety isn’t just fear of losing something, it can also be what shows up when you’re too close to something, when the usual gap you rely on narrows and you don’t know where you stand.
Follow the pattern, not the panic
What helps is not forcing a neat explanation, but getting curious about patterns:
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When does it hit hardest: mornings, evenings, Sundays, after socialising, before sleep?
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What tends to come just before it: a silence, a message, a demand, a compliment, a moment of rest?
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What are you trying not to think about once it starts?
You don’t need the perfect answer. You’re looking for the thread. In therapy, that thread is often enough.
As it becomes speakable, anxiety tends to lose some of its authority. It stops feeling like an attack “for no reason” and starts to feel like something meaningful trying, clumsily, to be heard.
More on Anxiety TherapyFurther Reading:
How Counselling Helps When You Don’t Know What’s Wrong
What Actually Happens in Therapy?
Clinical Reading:
- Jacques Lacan: Seminar X: Anxiety
Counselling
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