Anxiety is hard to talk about because most people either overcomplicate it or oversimplify it. They turn it into something vague and mystical or something mechanical that can be solved with a checklist. But it’s rarely either. It’s something quieter and more persistent, and a lot harder to pin down.
You’ve probably felt it yourself. That edge. That background buzz. It shows up when nothing’s obviously wrong, but something still feels off. You might write it off as stress or being in a weird mood, but deep down, it’s not random. It just hasn’t been named yet.
That’s where I’ve landed. Not on a solution, but on the idea that maybe the first real step toward managing anxiety is simply identifying it. Not in a general sense, but precisely. Figuring out what sets it off. What leads to it. What it’s actually reacting to. I don’t know if that’s the answer, but it’s the one I keep coming back to.
Pattern recognition is one of the most natural things we do. We use it constantly in the outside world. But when it comes to the internal stuff, most people stop applying it. We treat anxiety like a fog instead of a signal. Something to push through instead of something to study.
I’ve started watching more closely. When does it happen? What sets it off? What do these moments have in common? Sometimes I find something. Sometimes I don’t. But it feels like a better use of energy than pretending it isn’t happening and hoping it passes.
This isn’t advice. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than anyone else does. But if you’ve felt that same undercurrent and wanted to trace it back to something real, maybe this is a place to start. Not with answers. Just with a little more awareness.
That’s where I’m starting too.
Patterns, Not Panic
When I started paying closer attention, I realized that my anxiety never came from things happening in the moment. It never surfaced during pressure, confrontation, or anything requiring immediate action. The first time I was shot at, I froze briefly, but I didn’t spiral. I came back online and handled it. That kind of stress, the real kind, has never been where anxiety lives for me.
Instead, it shows up later. Quiet settings. Uneventful days. Moments that should feel like peace. That’s when it settles in, subtle but heavy, like my mind is searching for something to react to.
At first, I thought it was random. I assumed it was just part of the background noise everyone deals with. But the more I experienced it, the more I started to believe there was a pattern. I just hadn’t learned how to track it yet.
Eventually, I turned to a process I already use all the time. After-action reports have been a regular part of my professional life. Whether things go well or badly, you look back. You break it down. You map the chain of events so you can understand exactly what happened and why. It’s not about emotions or memory. It’s about facts, sequence, and clarity.
I started treating my anxiety the same way. Not in real time, because I rarely catch it as it begins. But afterward, I would walk it back. I’d sit down, usually after the tension passed, and start asking simple questions.
Where was I when I noticed the anxiety? What exactly was I doing before that? Was there a shift in tone, an interruption, or a thought that popped in without me noticing? Had I just finished something important, or was I avoiding something I didn’t want to face?
The goal wasn’t to overanalyze. It was to reconstruct the timeline. Like an after-action review, I wasn’t trying to feel my way through it—I was trying to identify triggers by looking at what actually led up to the moment. Fifteen minutes earlier. Thirty. An hour. Whatever it took.
The more I did this, the more consistent the patterns became. I could predict the conditions that tended to generate that anxious state, and once I could predict them, I could prepare for them or change how I engaged with them.
It didn’t make the anxiety vanish immediately, but it gave it shape. And once it had shape, it was something I could work with.
Rewriting the Reflex
I didn’t always call it exposure therapy. I just did the thing that scared me until it stopped scaring me. I didn’t have a formal process. I just knew I hated how fear felt, and I wasn’t willing to let it linger.
Years ago, I was afraid of flying. It wasn’t debilitating, but it lived in the back of my head every time I got on a plane. So I learned how to fly one. Not because I needed to be a pilot, but because I wanted to remove the unknown. Once I understood it, once I could feel what it was like to be in control of the aircraft, the fear went away completely. It didn’t fade. It was gone.
That pattern has held true in other parts of my life. One of the only things I’ve ever had a deep, lingering fear of is water. Not pools or swimming, but deep, open water. Not because of animals. With animals, you have options. You can defend yourself, escape, maybe even outthink them. But nature doesn’t care. A current doesn’t negotiate. If something goes wrong, you’re at its mercy.
That fear stayed with me for a long time. So I decided to challenge it the same way I always have. I’m getting scuba certified. Not to become a diver, not to chase thrills, but to confront the exact thing that makes me uncomfortable. Because based on my experience, once I understand something and experience it fully, the anxiety surrounding it doesn’t just lessen. It disappears. What was once a fear becomes something functional. Sometimes it even becomes enjoyable.
According to Andrew Huberman and others studying the neuroscience of anxiety, this is more than personal instinct. Voluntary exposure changes the way the autonomic nervous system categorizes a stimulus. If you avoid something that triggers anxiety, your brain reinforces the threat. If you voluntarily and repeatedly engage with it in a controlled setting, the brain begins to reassess. Over time, the fear response gets replaced with familiarity. Stress chemicals decrease. The stimulus no longer gets flagged as dangerous.
That tracks exactly with what I’ve lived. Exposure, for me, isn’t about tolerance. It’s about rewriting how my mind and body respond to something that used to feel like a threat. And once that response changes, the anxiety doesn’t just quiet down. It shuts off.
Putting It Together
If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that anxiety rarely survives direct contact. Not for me. When I ignore it, it grows. When I try to outthink it, it shifts shape. But when I face it with intention, something changes. The power dynamic flips.
That doesn’t mean I’ve solved it. I haven’t. But I’ve started to understand its behavior. It hides in the patterns we don’t question. It thrives in the spaces we avoid. And it loses ground when we name it, study it, and step into it on purpose.
I’m not interested in managing anxiety just well enough to function. I want to dismantle it. If I’m going to live with it, I want to strip it of mystery and remove its leverage. So far, identification and exposure have done more than anything else. That doesn’t mean they work for everyone, but they’ve worked for me.
If this resonates, maybe it’s worth testing. Not to prove anything to anyone. Just to see what happens when you stop backing away from what unsettles you.
Because fear can’t run your life if it no longer gets to hide.
-Gino