I’ve heard anxiety described as “wrestling a bear.”

Having personally lived with anxiety, I can confirm: Sometimes it feels less like a bear, but more often, like battling a full-grown grizzly.

The problem is this: Choosing to fight a 1,000-pound bear is the wrong fight when it comes to mental health. It’s exhausting and time-consuming, and after all that effort, you’re often left bruised, depleted, and wondering why the bear still hasn’t gone anywhere.

Globally, about 5 percent of people live with some form of anxiety. What makes anxiety particularly debilitating is not just its intensity, but its persistence. When it’s unmanaged, anxiety can feel like elevator music that never shuts off. Except instead of mildly annoying, it’s deeply uncomfortable, and somehow lodged in both your mind and your body.

Anxiety is not just a mental experience; it is a full-body event. And how our nervous system responds to it is often shaped early in life. Growing up with unmet needs, emotional neglect, or unpredictability can wire a person for the survival states—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—long before they have words for what’s happening.

In my own

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