Anxiety: Practices to Help Untangle Fear From Facts
TL;DR Anxiety can make fear feel like fact by activating the nervous system and narrowing rational thinking. Strategies to reduce the anxiety include grounding the body, slowing anxious thinking, reality-checking thoughts using CBT tools, creating distance from fear-based narratives, and increasing nervous system regulation. If anxiety is disrupting your life in a negative way, anxiety therapy can help you respond to fear with more clarity, flexibility, and calm.
If you live with anxiety, you likely know how convincing fear can feel. A single thought can spiral into a sense of urgency, dread, or certainty that something bad is about to happen. Even when part of you knows the fear may not be rational, your body reacts as if it is undeniably true.
This is not because you are weak, dramatic, or “overthinking.” It is because anxiety is very good at blurring the line between fear and fact.
For women juggling family responsibilities, relationships, careers, and the constant mental load of managing everyone else’s needs, anxiety often becomes the background noise of daily life. Learning how to untangle fear from facts is not about eliminating anxiety entirely, it is about understanding how it works and responding to it in a way that creates more safety, flexibility, and calm.
Why Fears Are Not Always Facts
Anxiety specializes in “what ifs.” What if I mess this up? What if something happens to my kids? What if I disappoint someone? What if I can’t handle it?
The anxious brain presents these thoughts not as possibilities, but as warnings. They arrive with intensity, urgency, and emotional weight, making them feel factual even when there is little evidence to support them.
One of the most important shifts in anxiety therapy is recognizing that a thought can feel true without being accurate. Fear is information, not proof. Understanding this distinction is the first step in loosening anxiety’s grip.
Anxiety’s Impact on the Nervous System and the Brain
Anxiety is not just a mental experience, it is a full-body nervous system response.
When your brain perceives a potential threat, the amygdala (the brain’s alarm system) activates. This triggers the sympathetic nervous system, releasing stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Your body prepares for danger by increasing heart rate, tightening muscles, sharpening focus, and scanning for risk.
This process is automatic and protective. The problem is that anxiety does not require real danger to activate. Deadlines, conflict, uncertainty, or even internal pressure can all be interpreted as threats.
At the same time, anxiety reduces access to the prefrontal cortex which is the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, perspective, and decision-making. When the alarm system is loud, logical thinking becomes quieter. This is why reassurance often doesn’t work and why anxious thoughts feel so believable in the moment.
Your brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do which is to prioritize safety. Unfortunately, in modern life, that safety system is often overworked.
Why Anxious Thoughts Feel So Convincing
Anxiety has several features that make fearful thoughts hard to ignore:
Repetition: Anxious thoughts repeat, which creates familiarity. Familiar thoughts feel true.
Emotion: Fear-based thoughts are paired with strong physical sensations, which the brain interprets as evidence.
Urgency: Anxiety frames thoughts as requiring immediate attention, making them difficult to question.
Responsibility: Many women feel responsible for preventing harm, making “worst-case” thinking feel necessary.
When anxiety tells you something is dangerous, your body reacts before you have time to assess it. This is why trying to “logic your way out” of anxiety often fails. The nervous system needs regulation before the mind can evaluate facts.
Practical Ways to Manage Anxiety and Fear
Untangling fear from facts requires practices that support both the body and the mind. Below are gentle, effective strategies that help interrupt anxiety’s cycle.
1. Name the Experience
Instead of arguing with the thought, try labeling it:
“This is an anxious thought.”
“My nervous system is activated.”
This creates distance without dismissal and reduces the sense that the thought is a fact.
2. Ground the Nervous System First
Before challenging thoughts, help your body feel safer:
Slow, deep breathing with longer exhales
Feeling your feet on the floor
Placing a hand on your chest or stomach
Regulation comes before reasoning.
3. Separate Possibility From Probability
Ask yourself:
Is this possible, or is it probable?
What evidence supports this fear?
What evidence does not?
This CBT-based approach helps restore balance without invalidating concern.
4. Replace “What If” With “What Is”
Anxiety lives in imagined futures. Gently bring your attention back to the present:
What is actually happening right now?
What do I know for sure in this moment?
This anchors your brain in facts rather than fear.
5. Limit Reassurance-Seeking
Repeatedly asking others for reassurance can unintentionally strengthen anxiety. Practice tolerating uncertainty in small ways, allowing discomfort to rise and fall on its own.
6. Practice Self-Compassionate Language
Instead of “Why am I like this?” try:
“This is hard, and I’m doing my best.”
“My anxiety is trying to protect me.”
Compassion calms the nervous system more effectively than criticism.
How Anxiety Therapy Can Help
Working with an anxiety therapist provides more than coping strategies—it offers a structured, supportive space to understand and retrain your nervous system.
Through anxiety therapy and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), you can:
Identify patterns that keep fear in control
Learn how to respond differently to anxious thoughts
Build tolerance for uncertainty
Increase nervous system regulation
Develop emotional safety from the inside out
Therapy is not about eliminating fear; it is about reducing its authority. Over time, the brain learns that not every alarm requires action, and the nervous system becomes more flexible and resilient.
For women carrying a heavy mental load, therapy can also be a rare space where you are not responsible for anyone else—where your internal experience is prioritized without judgment.
Support Is Available
If anxiety and fear are shaping your decisions, draining your energy, or keeping you stuck in cycles of worry, you do not have to navigate this alone.
I invite you to begin noticing how your body and mind respond to fear with curiosity rather than criticism. If anxiety is interfering with your well-being, relationships, or sense of self, reaching out to an anxiety therapist can be a powerful next step.
Therapy offers support, structure, and tools to help you separate fear from facts and move through life with greater calm and confidence. If you’re curious whether anxiety therapy could help you, I encourage you to reach out and start the conversation.
You don’t need to feel certain, you just need to begin. Contact me to start therapy now
About the author; Ljuba Udovc is a Registered Psychotherapist with 25 years experience supporting clients in Ontario. She provides both in-person sessions in Burlington, Ontario, or virtual sessions for individuals who live throughout Ontario. Click the link below to reach out now.
