Anxiety Is a Message from Your Psyche

Buddhist psychotherapist Pilar Jennings on defusing anxiety through curiosity, compassion, and staying with the body

Apr 05, 2026

Mary Talbot in conversation with Pilar Jennings, PhD

Anxiety seems to be the mental atmosphere in which many of us exist—all the time. In many ways, anxiety defines the current era. Maybe not surprising, given that our era has served up a pervasive sense of political and economic instability, mounting mental health challenges among young people, as well as doomscrolling and other pastimes that reflect relentless exposure to stress in our digital life. And the list goes on.

From a Buddhist perspective, anxiety can be understood as one outcome of the mind’s own grasping and clinging—one of the many manifestations of suffering, or dukkha. For Pilar Jennings, PhD, a psychotherapist who specializes in the clinical applications of Buddhist teachings and meditation, anxiety, uncomfortable—even torturous—as it may be, should be taken as a message from our psyches, worthy of respect and curiosity. She prescribes Buddhist tools, in tandem with psychotherapeutic methods, to investigate and demystify anxiety and other painful mindstates.

Jennings has written two books and many essays on the ways Buddhism and psychotherapy can work together. She is a longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, has been a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York City, and has been working with patients and their families through New York’s Harlem Family Institute for more than two decades.

Jennings has also contributed articles to and taught courses for Tricycle, and in recent years has led retreats and workshops (including this upcoming one) on Buddhist and psychotherapeutic strategies for working with chronic anxiety. She spoke with Mary Talbot, Tricycle’s former executive editor, on the nature of anxiety, why it feels like such a prevalent state of being for so many of us, and how both Buddhist and psychotherapeutic approaches and tools can dovetail to help people unpack and loosen the stranglehold of anxiety—and ultimately gain a greater sense of ease and well-being.

Anxiety seems to be the defining mental health issue of our times. So many people struggle with it—even feel that their lives are ruled by it. In your experience, both personal and professional, do you see anxiety as more pervasive or intense than it’s ever been? Not exactly, because it’s something I’ve seen with my patients and people in my life for a very long time. Fear and anxiety are a natural response to anything that feels threatening, so from the beginning of the human family, we’ve all been dealing with anxiety. But when we have fewer opportunities that are woven into our daily life to recover, to decompress, to restore feelings of safety, then anxiety can really take over. So, in that way, I would say yes. Many people in my personal life and my clinical life are dealing with pretty chronic levels of anxiety.

So anxiety may feel like such a prevalent condition in our society today because of how we respond to it? Yes. If we think of anxiety as being a response to anything that feels threatening, it’s basically a danger signal in the same way fear is. But it has a more personal component, a more subjective layer, than fear. Throughout the day, there are going to be many times when we feel a little bit of anxiety because we’re dealing with uncertainty all the time.

But most of us now are living a life that is chronically overstimulating, where it’s much harder to set firm boundaries around what we’re taking in, and whether or not we’re ready to take something in. As we know, technology has a lot to do with that. Isolation has a lot to do with it. The combination of more isolation and more access to information is a setup for people to feel they’re always on high alert.

In the past, people had problems that stirred a lot of anxiety, but there may have also been more opportunity to just sit and wait, or go outside and feel the breeze. We didn’t have phones. We didn’t have as many ways to convince ourselves that we’re self-soothing when actually we’re getting more stressed.

When someone is in the grip of anxiety, what is happening psychologically and somatically? When we’re gripped by anxiety, there’s a very powerful feeling of threat. Something feels unsafe. And one of the reasons anxiety is so dreadful is that the body is responding to try to ready us for action.

It’s the same somatic response we have to fear. The body does need to prepare if there’s an external threat. If a storm is coming, if there’s a war, if anything is going on that endangers us, then the amygdala—the threat center of the brain—starts firing. All the stress hormones start flowing. We breathe more rapidly, our heart rate increases. It’s very uncomfortable, but it’s all in the service of trying to garner more protection.

The difference between anxiety and fear is that with fear, we’re responding to an objective threat. With anxiety, it’s a little more confusing because it might seem that there’s an objective threat when there’s not.

Say we go to the doctor for a checkup, we do some blood work, and then the results show some abnormal numbers. For some people, that won’t be fun, but it won’t be a source of immense anxiety because they’re aware that there are steps to assess what’s going on and providers to evaluate what’s happening and offer reassurance. They trust that even if there is a health problem, there may be treatments available and loved ones who will offer support. But for some people, those abnormal numbers are all that’s needed to get gripped by anxiety.

Can you talk about where the “personal component” that differentiates anxiety from fear comes in? Part of the reason what I just described happens is there’s usually an unconscious psychological component. For instance, if someone has a history of being too on their own when they’re feeling moderately threatened or moderately unsafe, then all that past experience is right there in the unconscious and alarm bells are going off saying “danger.”

What do you mean by “too on their own”? An adult could have a history of having been too isolated as a child, or they didn’t get enough parental support, or there weren’t adults available to offer emotional and psychological care. They may not have had the interpersonal care needed to identify and tolerate difficult feelings and learn how to recover from them. The parts of the adult that carry that history get activated when there’s any sense of danger. Once again, they feel they won’t have what they need to cope, no one will be there to help, they’ll get overwhelmed. All of that has the potential to become the engine for anxiety.

Do you bring your own history of anxiety to working with people who are grappling with anxiety? When I began working as a psychotherapist, I didn’t self-identify as someone who suffers from much anxiety, in part because, like a lot of people, it wasn’t something I was super conscious of. But I was conscious of my wish to be in control and to try to tamp down anything that might stimulate anxiety. I readily admitted that I was a worrier. But I didn’t understand the layers that informed the worry. That became clearer to me as I learned more about the human condition. And it ultimately gave me a lot of compassion for the people I work with because I can easily find my way into their experience of not feeling safe enough and into the effort of trying to deal with all the distress that comes with anxiety, which then becomes its own source of suffering.

From a Buddhist perspective, our suffering is the result of clinging and craving for things to be a certain way, and aversion to what doesn’t square with our desires. How do you see anxiety in relation to that framework? Do you see it as primarily a form of clinging and grasping and aversion? Yes, I do. I’ve also been influenced by some of my clinical mentors who’ve explored Buddhist psychology for many years, like [the late psychotherapist and Buddhist scholar] Jack Engler. He suggested that the deepest anxiety we carry is about the fact that we don’t exist in the solid, abiding way we wish we did.

That’s a very existential take on anxiety. Totally existential. Engler believed—and I really agree—that it’s not ultimately death that terrifies us. It’s the experience of being in life in this vulnerable, fluid way.

Life comes with all sorts of experiences and dynamics we cannot control and that generate stress. So, from a Buddhist perspective, if we can learn to appreciate the nature of our being, which is incredibly dynamic, we can start to soften our tendency to want to get control over that vulnerability, which we just don’t have. When that happens—and this causes a lot of cognitive dissonance for people—there’s a reduction in stress. We start to appreciate that we are, by our nature, vulnerable. If we can be on board with that truth, then all those efforts at control, which generate the anxiety, start to settle.

But if we are refusing that truth, and we often do, that sets us up for a lot of pain and frustration when other people do things that make us feel even moderately stressed or unsafe. Or when we try desperately to hold on to the people or the experiences we think give us the feeling of solidity that we want.

Which gets back to your earlier point about the unskillful ways we try to assuage feelings of anxiety, like by retreating from the world or being on our phones or doing other things that ultimately aren’t in our best interest? We’re not guarding the sense doors, as it’s described in Buddhism. Absolutely. This is the sad thing about anxiety: Because it takes some work to get to the deeper causes, most of us end up just dealing with the symptoms, and our efforts at managing anxiety can leave us worse off. For instance, we may isolate ourselves because we believe if we’re isolated, we’re less susceptible to having the experiences we think will cause us distress. But we end up feeling lonely and uncared for and even frightened, because we’re aware that isolation is actually a much more dangerous place to be in.

In my experience, there are times when distraction can be very helpful in short-circuiting a cycle of anxiety or even panic, by interrupting the symptoms themselves. Do you think there’s a role for that kind of intervention, to cool things down to the point where other, more deep-reaching interventions are possible? In terms of finding ways to feel better in the short term, there are interventions that are relatively nonharming or completely nonharming. They’re going to help the body feel a little bit more comfortable. They’re going to help the nervous system get recalibrated. But other interventions are going to cause a whole other set of problems. Which doesn’t mean that we can never do them. So if it’s watching TV, because that feels like it’s helping us chill out, fine.

But when that becomes the go-to mechanism for self-soothing, it interrupts the opportunity to stay with the initial discomfort and begin to investigate it. And that’s basically a setup for addiction.

For most people, the breath is the fastest-acting agent for reducing stress.

The idea, from my perspective, is to find various ways to self-soothe but to discern how we are self-soothing. Are we doing some breath work? Are we taking a walk with a friend? Are we listening to some music? Or are we reaching out for things that we know will bring us immediate comfort but don’t help us with a deeper, longer-term struggle?

We know that even a very simple mindfulness practice can help us cultivate a little more tolerance for whatever’s happening internally. Building up that tolerance is key, so that we can begin to understand more and investigate what are actually the underlying causes of anxiety. These methods can also help us build trust that we can withstand the discomfort of anxiety. It doesn’t feel good, but it won’t hurt us if we can hang in there until we get a little more insight and awareness.

So what do you recommend for someone who’s caught in a really uncomfortable state of anxiety? For most people, the breath is the fastest-acting agent for reducing stress. And so even if it’s two minutes of slowing down the breath and then adding in a few moments of breath- holding, especially at the bottom of the outbreath, that will recalibrate the autonomic nervous system and potentially help people start to feel enough relief that they’re able to reflect a little bit. But some people will say, no, they can’t do it. They’ve tried, it doesn’t work.

Or they could be in such a state of panic they don’t feel they can get control of the breath. Exactly. But still the body is what needs to be tended to first—all our mental struggles are in response to what’s happening physiologically. So, for those folks, I would recommend some very slow, gentle movement. It could be a five-minute qigong video, or it could be an exercise that they normally do, but done very slowly because the body starts to read that as a cue of safety. We move very quickly when we’re unsafe.

For other people, listening to sounds is effective—it could be bells, could be music, something that they’re not working too hard to take in, but that conveys to the body that it’s safe enough to decompress.

Can you talk about the role of compassion and self-compassion vis-à-vis anxiety? It’s a profound role. Without some genuine self-compassion, it will feel too treacherous to have a close look at our suffering, in part because when we start to do that, it immediately triggers shame, humiliation, embarrassment.

Because we don’t feel like we deserve it. Yes. We don’t feel like we deserve it, or we’re holding so much frustrated rage about our suffering, which then causes a lot of shame because we’re such an angry person. It becomes very difficult to actually reflect on what’s layered into the suffering. And so, in my experience as a therapist, without enough self-compassion, the healing is always pretty elusive.

Practicing self-compassion can help people start to realize that their suffering matters. That’s basically what compassion is. It doesn’t mean it matters more than anybody else’s suffering, but it doesn’t matter less than anybody else’s suffering. Then we start to bring on board some respect, some curiosity, all the other inner responses that we need to be able to learn more about what keeps the anxiety going. So clinically, self-compassion is essential for any potential healing process. The same is true in the Buddhist tradition. We know that without an open heart, without some tenderness toward our own suffering, we really struggle to be able to use the wisdom teachings to investigate what’s layered into our struggles and what keeps them going.

So how do you guide someone struggling with anxiety to start cultivating compassion for themselves? You can start with the traditional phrases, or you can use your own. They can be very simple: “May I be safe. May I live with ease. May I be cared for. May I be free from suffering. May I find happiness.” For some people, this sounds too benign to be effective, but we now have decades of neuroscience that shows how effective these simple interventions are. Again, they’re just enough to convey to the nervous system that we’re safer than we feel we are.

If we can approach our anxiety with respect, that it’s actually a communication from the psyche, then that alone can sometimes interrupt the tendency to respond to it with efforts to try to make it go away as quickly as possible.

I also recommend a little bit of self-touch. It could be hand on heart, a hand on the belly. I’m doing that right now, and I can sense that my interoception, my internal experience, is responding, and it feels good. There’s a sense of being greeted with some warmth. So it could be hand on heart and then saying the phrases, “May I be safe. May I be well. May I live with ease.”

Try that for two minutes, or five minutes, even if you have a conviction that it can’t help. We just have to stick with the things that might actually help and not let the doubts prevent us from giving it a try.

How can we overcome, in the moment, a very intense drive to simply escape the experience of anxiety? If we can approach our anxiety with respect, that it’s actually a communication from the psyche, then that alone can sometimes interrupt the tendency to respond to it with efforts to try to make it go away as quickly as possible. It can also reduce some of the shame around feeling anxious. Our contemporary Western culture is all about being high-functioning and getting what we need on our own. And so anxiety usually does come with some humiliation. If we can appreciate that actually the anxiety is trying to communicate that there’s something that we’ve already been through that really matters and could benefit from more curiosity, benefit from more understanding, kind of like a recurring dream—dreams keep coming back when there’s something there in the imagery that requires a response, requires care. So if folks can just take that and maybe even ask the anxiety, “What do you want me to know about this anxiety? What would help me to learn more so that I can potentially address something that I have needed to address for some time?”

Our thoughts can change, and then our life can too. Anxiety is also impermanent.

So that can lead to a healing process. Absolutely. And to basically depathologize anxiety. Kind of like depression, it’s part of the human condition. The question is always, How are we responding to it? And I would say if folks find themselves caught in addictive modes of self-soothing and response to anxiety, let the addiction also be a communication. There’s also something there that deserves care and respect.

That existential fear you mentioned earlier comes up as part of being human, the realization that things are in flux and that we’re in flux, that we may not be a fixed self. From Buddhist perspectives, thoughts fall into that category as well—they’re not facts, they’re not fixed truths. And through meditation, we can begin to see that pretty clearly. Where does that come in when you’re thinking about anxiety? It’s a revelation for many meditators that their beliefs, which are composed of countless thoughts and memories, didn’t feel like beliefs, they just felt like absolute truths. But when you start to investigate, thoughts are actually a little more porous. It’s enormously helpful when we realize, OK, the mind is reinforcing a belief with a generated thought that just keeps coming up again and again. We become ruminative or obsessive with our thinking, and then we create this really tight weave around a belief. It could be “the world is a dangerous place.” It could be, “I can’t be loved. I can’t be known. Other people won’t like me. I will be forgotten. I will be left out.” When we start to see, actually, it’s not an absolute truth, it is something that’s been generated by the mind—and I would say as a therapist and as a person, usually by a lot of relational experience—it can help people start to contact a little bit of hope. Maybe other thoughts could come on board that generate different feelings about the world and about oneself.

It’s just that our thoughts matter. Sometimes in the dharma we’re encouraged to allow the thoughts to settle before we’ve had an opportunity to have a close look at them. And in therapy, we also don’t want to get fixated on our thoughts, but we don’t want to drop them too quickly either so we can start to appreciate that there’s meaning in those thoughts. The meaning really matters. But when we start to notice they’re not absolute truths, then there’s the potential for new experience. Our thoughts can change, and then our life can too. Anxiety is also impermanent.

To hear Pilar’s guided meditations for working with anxiety, click here and scroll part-way down the page.

Pilar Jennings is an author and psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power in Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action.

Mary Talbot is Tricycle’s former executive editor and was the editor-at-large until 2017.

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