Ending Your Struggle with Anxiety

If you’ve lived with anxiety for any amount of time, you’ve probably tried to control it. Most people do. It’s our natural instinct: if something feels uncomfortable, painful, or threatening, we try to push it away or shut it down.

And that works beautifully for external problems. If a light switch doesn’t work, you change it out. If your phone freezes, you restart it.If the car makes a noise, you take it to a mechanic.

Control works in the physical world. But when you apply that same strategy to your internal world — thoughts, feelings, sensations — it backfires.

Trying to control anxiety almost always makes anxiety worse.

This blog is about why that happens, and how learning to let go of the struggle can help you create a healthier, more workable relationship with anxiety.

The Struggle Trap (Tug-of-War With Anxiety)

Before we go any deeper, let me share one of the clearest pictures of this struggle.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) often uses the metaphor of a tug-of-war with a monster called Anxiety. Between you and the monster is a pit. You believe that if you lose, you’ll be pulled into something terrible, so you pull with everything you’ve got.

But the monster pulls back.

You pull harder.It pulls harder.

Over time, the struggle becomes the real exhaustion.

Here’s the truth ACT teaches:

You don’t win this battle by pulling harder — you win it by dropping the rope.

Dropping the rope doesn’t make anxiety vanish, but it ends the fight. And when the fight ends, the suffering decreases.

This metaphor helps us understand why control fails and why the struggle itself becomes the problem.

Why Control Doesn’t Work for Anxiety

Anxiety is made up of several internal experiences:

• Thoughts

• Emotions

• Bodily sensations

• Images

• Memories

• Urges

The problem is that these experiences don’t obey the same rules as the external world.

You can’t flip a switch to stop a thought. You can’t “restart” your mind. You can’t uninstall a feeling like you uninstall an app.

But we try anyway.

We fight thoughts. We push away feelings. We avoid situations that might trigger anxiety. We tense our bodies trying to “calm down.”

Underneath all those efforts is a simple belief:

“If I can control how I feel, then I’ll finally be okay.”

ACT calls this the control agenda — the idea that internal discomfort must be eliminated before you can live the life you want.

But here’s what really happens:

Anxiety doesn’t grow because something is wrong with you. Anxiety grows because you’re fighting it.

When you resist a feeling, you teach your brain that the feeling itself is dangerous. When you avoid a situation, you teach your brain that anxiety is something to escape. When you push a thought away, it comes back with more intensity.

The Cost of Struggle

Most people don’t realize that struggling with anxiety is the real source of their distress — not the anxiety itself.

Think about these patterns:

• You feel a tightness in your chest → you panic about the sensation

• You think “what if I fail?” → you argue with the thought

• You imagine something bad happening → you avoid anything that reminds you of it

This is the struggle trap.You feel anxious → you fight it → the fight increases anxiety → convincing you to fight harder.

In other words:

Control creates more of the very thing you’re trying to control.

Ending the struggle starts with understanding what’s actually under your control — and what isn’t.

What You Can Control — and What You Cannot

You cannot control:

• What thoughts show up

• What emotions arise

• What sensations appear

• What memories surface

• How your body automatically reacts

• How quickly anxiety fades

But you can control:

• How you respond

• Where you place your attention

• Whether you open up or shut down

• Small actions you take right now

• How you treat yourself in difficult moments

• The values you move toward

Sorting these categories is often a relief. It breaks the illusion that you must manage every internal experience before you can live your life.

This clarity is the beginning of psychological flexibility — the heart of ACT. It’s about choosing your actions based on what matters, not based on what you feel.

You’ll find a simple tool for this at the end of the blog.

Willingness Begins Where Struggle Ends

Letting go of control doesn’t mean giving up — it means shifting from struggle to willingness.

Willingness is a core part of ACT, but we’re only naming it here because the next blog in this series will explore it more deeply. For now, just hold this simple idea:

You don’t need anxiety to disappear before you can live your life. You only need to stop fighting it.

That shift — from struggle to willingness — is what frees you to grow.

Ending the Struggle

Most people spend years waiting for anxiety to disappear before they start living with purpose, connection, or freedom.

The truth is the opposite:

Your life expands when your struggle with anxiety decreases.

You don’t need anxiety to go away.You need your relationship with anxiety to change.

When you stop pulling on the rope, when you stop trying to control what you cannot control, anxiety becomes something you can move with — not something you must conquer.

That’s the beginning of real freedom.

Download the Free Worksheet

To help you sort what you can control from what you can’t, download this free worksheet:

👉 Download the “What You Can Control” worksheet www.shaunhardie.com/resource

If you want to explore this topic further, the concepts in this blog are based on one of the best ACT workbooks for anxiety. You can find it here on Amazon.