Five Types of Optional Anxiety That Are Quietly Running Your Life
- Dr. Scott Eilers, PsyD, LP
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
If your anxiety never seems to fully go away no matter what you do, that is not a personal failure. Anxiety will always be part of the deal when you're a thinking, feeling human being living in a world that doesn't guarantee outcomes. That part is non-negotiable. But here is what I've come to believe after years of working with people as both a therapist and a coach: a significant portion of the anxiety most people carry around every single day is completely optional. It doesn't have to be there. It's being created, usually without realizing it, through habits and patterns that feel like coping but are quietly making everything worse.
Understanding the Difference Between Unavoidable and Optional Anxiety
Anxiety at its core is just information. It is your brain's way of flagging something that seems potentially threatening and saying, I want you to know about this and have a plan for it. That version of anxiety is not the enemy. The problem is that most people are also carrying a second layer of anxiety on top of that, one that is entirely self-generated and completely removable. Once you can identify which is which, your whole experience of daily life can shift significantly. These are the five most common types I see, and what you can actually do about each one.
Type 1: Control Anxiety
When Your Need for Ideal Conditions Becomes a Liability
Control anxiety is what happens when you start attaching conditions to your own contentment. It usually sounds like: I'll be okay once things are this way, or I can only enjoy this if everything lines up correctly. On the surface it feels like reasonable preference. Underneath, it is a setup for chronic dissatisfaction, because every condition you place on your happiness becomes something that can go unfulfilled.
I grew up near a beautiful, clear lake and genuinely loved being on the water. But on cloudy or windy days when I couldn't see far down into it, something in my brain would say no. So I'd stay in. I missed a large chunk of that experience simply because I needed the conditions to be a certain way before I felt safe enough to engage. The lake was the same lake. The problem was the list of requirements I had attached to enjoying it.
The fix here is not just telling yourself to let go, because that phrase does nothing on its own. What actually works is voluntarily putting yourself in the un-ideal situation and observing the result. Did you actually have a terrible time, or did your anxiety turn out to be wrong? Because most of the time, it is wrong. You just need enough real-world evidence to the contrary for it to start losing its hold on you. The more you avoid the imperfect situation, the stronger the anxiety around it becomes. The more you walk into it anyway, the weaker it gets.
Type 2: Malnourishment Anxiety
Your Brain Cannot Regulate Emotions It Cannot Fuel
This one surprises people, but it is one of the most direct and correctable causes of heightened anxiety that I know of. When your brain does not have consistent access to high quality caloric energy, its ability to manage your emotional experience deteriorates significantly. During acute periods of caloric deficit, the brain can physically shrink in volume by up to 30%. That is not a metaphor. That is a measurable change in brain functioning, and it affects everything including your ability to handle stress, regulate mood, and keep anxiety from spiraling.
Your metabolic rate also slows during fight-or-flight responses, which anxiety itself can trigger, meaning the cycle feeds itself. You feel anxious, your digestion slows, you eat less or poorly, your brain gets less fuel, your anxiety worsens. Recognizing that pattern is the first step to breaking it.
If this is a behavioral issue rather than a clinical one, the prescription is genuinely simple: three high quality, balanced meals each day, spaced no more than six hours apart. That consistency gives your brain the sustained energy it needs to regulate your emotions properly throughout the day. It won't solve everything, but it removes one major variable that is almost certainly making things harder than they need to be.
Type 3: Impression Management Anxiety
Other People's Perceptions Are Not Yours to Control
Impression management anxiety is in many ways a subtype of control anxiety, except instead of trying to engineer your environment, you are trying to engineer what exists in other people's minds. The way you dress, the way you speak, what you admit to liking, how you curate your presence online, how much energy you spend replaying a conversation after it ends wondering how you came across. The amount of daily mental and emotional bandwidth this consumes for a lot of people is extraordinary.
And here is the painful truth about all of it: you cannot control what someone else thinks of you. Their perception of you belongs to them. It is their mental property, not yours to rewrite. Even when their perception is factually wrong, even when you could disprove it given the chance, the amount of effort it typically takes to change it is almost never proportional to the return, because most of those relationships do not last forever anyway.
What I can tell you from personal experience is that no matter how difficult a person you are, and I have years of evidence that I am genuinely difficult to get along with, there will be people who like you. There will be people who get you. Spending your resources trying to manufacture that outcome in people who are not naturally inclined toward you is an exercise in futility. Stop spending those resources on people who haven't chosen you. Put them toward the ones who have, and toward yourself.
Type 4: Exhaustion Anxiety
What One Hour of Lost Sleep Actually Does to Your Emotional Resilience
Your brain has an emotion regulation system whose job is to take whatever you are feeling and put it in context. It is the part of you that asks, how bad is this really? Is this actually a crisis or does it just feel like one right now? That system is what keeps anxiety from running the whole show. And it is directly, measurably impaired by sleep loss.
Emotion regulation capacity decreases by roughly 10% for every hour of sleep lost below your personal baseline. So if you need eight hours and got six last night, you are operating at around 80% of your emotional resilience capacity today. That gap is not trivial. That is the difference between being able to contextualize a stressful situation and being completely overwhelmed by it.
No mindset work, no belief system overhaul, no amount of deep breathing fully compensates for a brain that has been consistently under-rested. And while sleep is not a simple variable to control, the conditions around it are more manageable than people realize. The comfort of your physical sleep environment, your wind-down routine, your consistency of schedule, all of these things affect how well your brain is able to recover overnight and show up for you the next day. Sleep is not a luxury. For anxiety management specifically, it is one of the most powerful levers you have.
Type 5: Deception Anxiety
The Weight of What You Are Working This Hard to Hide
This is the hardest one on the list, not because it is complicated to understand but because confronting it is genuinely painful. Deception anxiety is the constant, grinding weight of carrying a secret from someone you care about. It could be a substance problem, a spending or gambling issue, something happening in a relationship, a struggle with self-harm, a behavioral pattern you are deeply ashamed of. The specific content matters less than the architecture of it, which is this: every single day, you are devoting enormous mental resources to keeping that thing hidden. Keeping your story straight. Anticipating discovery. Managing the fallout in your head before it has even happened. It runs in the background of everything.
And here is what makes it particularly brutal: the effort required to maintain the secret does not stay flat. It compounds. The longer it goes on, the more there is to manage, the more elaborate the scaffolding around it becomes, and the heavier it gets. I have never seen this end well when left alone. The secret does not resolve itself. It just gets more expensive to carry.
The way through it is to tell at least one person. If it is something you can address without professional support, that likely means telling the people it affects. If it is something clinical, an addiction, an eating disorder, a compulsive behavior, you will need a team, and you cannot build that team without first admitting the thing exists. Either way, disclosure is the starting point.
It will almost certainly feel worse before it feels better. But the reduction in daily anxiety that comes from no longer running that operation in the background of your life is, in my experience, almost incomprehensible until you have felt it yourself. And most of the time, the people you have been most afraid to tell will judge you far less harshly than you have been judging yourself.
You Cannot Remove All Anxiety. You Can Remove Most of What Is Optional.
Anxiety is not going away entirely. That was never the goal. But if you are walking around carrying control anxiety, running your brain on poor nutrition, pouring energy into managing other people's perceptions of you, operating sleep-deprived, and maintaining a secret that costs you something every day, you are living with a level of suffering that is not mandatory. Start with whichever one hit closest to home. That is almost always the right place to begin.
(If this post hit home, you’ll probably connect with my new book, The Light Between the Leaves. It’s a practical guide for the days when “try harder” stops working.
-Scott
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FAQ
Q: Can anxiety routines be a sign of depression?Yes. Many people with high-functioning depression use anxiety routines as coping strategies. These routines often mask deeper struggles but also keep people stuck.
Q: What’s the difference between healthy preparation and an anxiety routine?Preparation helps you engage with life. Anxiety routines prevent you from living it. The difference is whether the habit expands or shrinks your world.
Q: What if I’ve tried therapy and it hasn’t helped?You’re not broken. Traditional therapy often overlooks people who need practical, science-based strategies. That’s why I share tools that most mental health providers aren’t teaching.
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