Why Anxiety Monitoring Makes It Worse & What to Do Instead
- Apr 7
- 2 min read
When anxiety shows up, it's natural to check in on it. Is my heart racing? Am I breathing okay? Do I look nervous? Is this getting worse?
The Anxiety Monitoring Loop
This feels like a reasonable thing to do, like you're keeping tabs on a problem so you can manage it. But here's the catch: paying close attention to a body sensation makes that sensation stronger. This is simply how attention works. The more closely you monitor your heartbeat and your breathing, the more intense and "loud" those sensations become.
So the loop looks like this:
You feel a flicker of anxiety.
You turn inward to check on it.
The checking itself amplifies the sensation.
The stronger sensation feels like proof that something's wrong.
You check again, more urgently.
You end up in a feedback loop where the monitoring itself manufactures more of the anxiety it was supposed to track.
In technical terms, the effect of anxiety monitoring looks like this: bodily sensation → monitoring → threat interpretation → greater arousal → stronger sensation
Why Turning Outward Helps
Turning attention outward means deliberately engaging with what is actually happening around you. This might involve:
listening carefully to what another person is saying
noticing the details of the room or environment
focusing on the activity you are completing
asking another person a genuine question
directing attention toward what matters to you in that moment
Your nervous system has a setting that calms the body down, and it gets switched on by genuine engagement with the world outside your own head, especially with other people. A real conversation, or genuinely watching what's happening in a room, sends your body a signal: things are okay enough that I can attend to something other than myself. That signal calms the body directly as it shifts your physiological state. Redirecting your attention outward removes the fuel from the loop that's keeping the anxiety going.
The Catch
There's a wrong way to "go outward" that doesn't work: scanning the room to see if other people notice you're anxious. That's still all about you. It's self-monitoring wearing a disguise, aimed outward while still quietly asking, "How am I doing?" The real move is to get genuinely absorbed in something outside yourself. Follow the actual thread of what someone is saying. Take in the real details of a room, its colors, its sounds. Give yourself over to a task's next concrete step.
The test is simple: are you tracking the world, or are you tracking yourself?
A Practical Way to Practice
Next time you notice yourself checking in on your anxiety, try this:
Notice the urge to check. That urge is your cue to act.
Pick one external thing and give it your full attention - a person's face, a task's next step.
Stay with it longer than feels natural. The urge to check back in will pass if you don't feed it.
This gets easier with repetition. Each time you decline to hand the anxiety your attention, you starve the very thing that was keeping it alive.
