You Don’t Have to Stop the Waves: A Different Way of Responding to Anxiety

When anxiety rises, it is natural to want it to stop.

We try to settle the thoughts, get rid of the uncomfortable sensations, reassure ourselves that everything will be okay, or find some way to regain control. Sometimes those strategies help. But they can also create another problem: we begin to believe that we need to feel calm before we can be okay.

When anxiety rises, it is natural to want it to stop.

We try to settle the thoughts, get rid of the uncomfortable sensations, reassure ourselves that everything will be okay, or find some way to regain control. Sometimes those strategies help. But they can also create another problem: we begin to believe that we need to feel calm before we can be okay.

This can turn anxiety into a struggle on two levels. There is the original discomfort, and then there is the effort to make that discomfort disappear.

A different approach is to practise being steady while the discomfort is still there.

This is one of the ideas behind grounding and mindfulness. The aim is not necessarily to stop the waves. It is to develop our capacity to remain grounded while they move around us.

When calm becomes something we have to achieve

Anxiety tends to draw our attention towards threat.

Our minds begin anticipating what might happen, our bodies become more activated, and attention narrows towards whatever seems dangerous or uncertain. Once we notice these changes, it is understandable that we want to reverse them.

We might tell ourselves to calm down. We may analyse the situation repeatedly, look for reassurance, distract ourselves, avoid whatever is making us uncomfortable, or monitor our body to see whether the anxiety is going away.

The difficulty is that this monitoring can inadvertently communicate something important to the brain: this feeling needs to stop.

And if anxiety needs to stop before we can feel safe, its continued presence becomes further evidence that something is wrong.

The struggle with anxiety can therefore become part of what keeps our attention fixed upon it.

The rock and the waves

Imagine a large rock standing in the ocean.

Waves arrive. Some are small. Others hit with considerable force. Water moves around the rock, over it and away again.

The rock does not need to control the ocean in order to remain where it is.

There is a useful psychological distinction in that image.

Thoughts, emotions and physical sensations are constantly changing. Anxiety can rise quickly. A difficult thought can appear without invitation. Our heart can race, our breathing can change, or a feeling of dread can arrive before we fully understand what triggered it.

We often cannot control that first wave.

What we can gradually develop is our relationship with what happens next.

Instead of immediately treating the experience as something that must be eliminated, we can notice it, make room for its presence, reconnect with what is happening around us, and allow some of the internal movement to occur without becoming completely organised around it.

That isn’t passivity. Nor does it mean liking anxiety or resigning ourselves to feeling distressed.

It means discovering that discomfort and steadiness can exist at the same time.

A one-minute grounding practice

Grounding and mindfulness are easier to understand through experience than explanation.

The brief grounding practice below uses the image of waves moving around a rock to help you reconnect with a sense of steadiness without requiring the internal turbulence to disappear first.

What are you actually practising?

It would be easy to interpret an exercise like this as simply a relaxation technique.

Relaxation may happen, and that’s perfectly welcome. But it doesn’t need to be the measure of whether the exercise worked.

The exercise is better understood as a grounding practice that also draws on principles of mindfulness. You are deliberately reconnecting your attention with the present while practising a different response to what is happening internally.

Rather than immediately trying to change an uncomfortable thought, feeling or physical sensation, you are creating a little space between experiencing anxiety and reacting to anxiety. Perhaps most importantly, you are practising the possibility that an uncomfortable feeling can be present without requiring an emergency response.

That distinction matters.

If we only use grounding or mindfulness in order to make anxiety disappear, they can inadvertently become another form of control: I’ll do this exercise so that I don’t have to feel this.

A more flexible position is: This is what I’m experiencing right now. Can I allow it to be here while I remain connected to myself and what is happening around me?

Sometimes the waves settle quickly. Sometimes they don’t.

Neither outcome determines whether you practised well.

Steadiness is different from stillness

We often imagine emotional regulation as returning ourselves to a perfectly calm state.

Human nervous systems don’t really work that way.

There will be periods of activation, uncertainty, sadness, frustration and fear. Some situations genuinely require us to respond. Others activate systems designed to protect us even when there is no immediate danger requiring action.

Emotional regulation is therefore not the ability to remain permanently calm. It is increasingly being able to experience changes in our internal state without automatically being carried away by them.

That might mean noticing that your mind is racing and returning your attention to the conversation in front of you. Feeling anxiety before an appointment and going anyway. Recognising the urge to seek reassurance and waiting for a moment before acting on it. Or simply noticing tension in your body without immediately concluding that something is wrong.

These are small acts of psychological flexibility.

Over time, they can change the relationship we have with uncomfortable internal experiences.

When the waves are bigger

A one-minute grounding exercise is not a solution to every form of distress.

Sometimes anxiety is connected to circumstances that need to change. Sometimes our nervous system has been under sustained pressure for a long time. Trauma, relationship difficulties, workplace stress, grief and other experiences can require considerably more than a brief grounding exercise.

The purpose of a practice like this isn’t to minimise those realities.

It is to give you something small that can be used within them.

A minute in which you don’t have to solve everything.

A minute in which thoughts can remain unfinished.

A minute in which the goal isn’t to force yourself to feel differently.

Just an opportunity to notice the waves, reconnect with the present, and rediscover the part of you that can remain steady while they pass.

Because sometimes the most useful question isn’t:

How do I make this feeling stop?

It is:

Can I remain steady while this feeling is here?