Is It Really Anxiety? Or The Fear Of Feeling Good?

A reflection on how our bodies mistake peace for danger and why joy can feel like a threat when we’ve been conditioned to survive chaos.

Hey Friends!

I don’t know about y’all, but I have just not been feeling it this last week. My body has been speaking to me and I am battling the old pattern of bypassing that voice in my head that says “ Sav, you know better.” Thinking about the body and the way that it speaks to us— if we are paying attention.

You know, as I sit in my sessions being an observer in my day to day collecting the data of my own lived experience. I move through life conceptualizing the events of the world and human behavior along with it. If the collective is all vibrating at a low hum of pain, grief, panic, or fear— it makes sense why the world is anxious.

Here is the thing about anxiety. We talk about anxiety as if it’s ours: “my anxiety, her anxiety, the collective anxiety.” What if… The very thing we are calling anxiety is actually the fear of surrendering to joy?

I think this because through my clinical work and practice and from what I observe. Many people when things are going good the first thing they always say “well...”

Well what?

Many times people are so afraid of speaking on the joy, the abundance, or even the good things that are happening in their life. They're afraid to name it. Because somehow, if they name it, it means it may get taken from them…

Now zoom out with me.

Take a stroll down algorithm lane. What’s the most common thing you see? People hating. Someone gets a house, a car, a new job and boom, here come the comments. Jealousy. Comparison. Shade. You can count on someone to throw shit. If we’re all collectively witnessing that on loop, what do you think that’s doing to our nervous systems?

Now think early childhood development. From the moment a baby enters the world, their brain is soaking everything in. No filter. No firewall. Just pure download mode — environment is everything.

So if we, as a society, are stuck watching negativity and projection on replay... what kind of imprint do you think that’s leaving?

Dr. Bruce Lipton enters the chat.

I’m a big believer in the power of etiology—the study of cause. And if it’s true that our environments shape us during early development, then we can’t ignore how they continue shaping us now. We see it in research. We see how environment influences behavior. We see what happens when fear spreads like wildfire—how mass hysteria alters how people act. The environment does something, and the nervous system alchemizes to survive it.

It absorbs it. Mimics it. Adapts.

So if we agree on that, then let’s look at what we’re seeing today. Scroll online: it’s constant criticism. Someone buys a house? Hate. Someone gets a promotion? Hate. Someone’s just being joyful or doing good in the world? Hate. Good people with good hearts are getting slandered left and right—and we’re watching it, over and over again.

So what is that teaching our nervous systems?

Here’s the part nobody talks about: when hate becomes the environment, it rewires our risk tolerance. We don’t just fear failure, we fear being seen. Being celebrated. Being chosen. Because we’ve internalized the crab-in-the-bucket logic: if I rise, I’ll be pulled back down. Now we’re anxious, not just because of trauma, but because of conditioned fear of joy. We’re terrified of being criticized, rejected, or humiliated for having something good. We say we want blessings, but when they show up, we flinch.

Because if I’m watching people in my life shine—doing good, aligned with love, living with intention, and they’re still being ridiculed for it? That messes with my brain. It makes me second-guess whether it’s even safe to have good things. It teaches me that even if I surrender to the joy, it might be taken from me.

And that “being taken from you” fear? That’s not your intuition, we often confuse that. That’s distortion—an imprint from your past. The more you play with that distortion like it’s kinetic sand, the more it distracts you from what you’re actually craving: peace, joy, freedom.

I have so many clients who are actually in healthy relationships—but they can’t feel it. Their nervous systems don’t register safety as safe, because their blueprint for connection was shaped by what they lived through, what they witnessed in their parents, and what they now absorb through peer stories and algorithmic content. It’s not just childhood conditioning anymore. It’s digital conditioning. What they saw their mother tolerate, or their father suppress, or what they scrolled past online becomes embedded. It starts to infiltrate their cognitive process and cloud their perception of what’s real in their own lives. And if you grew up watching adults who never divorced but constantly complained, fought, or silently resented each other—your nervous system starts to interpret that as normal. So even when your current partner is calm and consistent, your body might still brace for betrayal. These behaviors aren’t character flaw. They’re patterns… You see that?

This is the part of the safari tour where we pull over to zoom…

The most painful part about these dynamics is that the distress often isn’t coming from the relationship—it’s coming from inside the woman. We don’t know how to name that, so we label it “mine.” We say “my anxiety,” “my reactivity,” “my fear”—but what if it isn’t yours? What if it’s the collective energy of internalized trauma, passed-down scripts, and unresolved wounds that you’ve absorbed through proximity and repetition? The moment I say “this is my anxiety,” I’ve claimed something I didn’t choose. I’ve identified with the discomfort rather than witnessing it. That identification becomes a trap, because now I think it’s personal, inevitable, or a permanent part of me. I start organizing my life around protecting myself from it rather than disarming it with presence.

This is where the power of suggestion becomes so dangerous. It’s not just trauma that shapes us—it’s repetition. Suggestion doesn’t need to scream to be effective. Sometimes it’s as quiet as, “Are you okay? You look tired,” or “You sure you’re not sick?” Hear that enough, and your brain starts to believe it. You panic. You spiral. You feel something must be wrong—even when your body was calm before the comment. This is why we have to be intentional with the stories we absorb, the words we repeat, and the thoughts we let root. Those ANTs—Automatic Negative Thoughts are quiet, but they swarm. They infest our inner landscape until we believe the discomfort is our identity.

Now, let's go back to surrendering to Joy.

That panic or fear— what if it has nothing to do with failure? What if it's about the fear of finally being free?

Finally being free of survival mode.

Free of feeling the anxiety in the body that caused you to always scan in hypervigilance for the next threat.

To be in that feeling of just… Presence. That can seem frightening for many of us. It almost feels dangerous. So what happens is our protector part kicks in, and then we unconsciously avoid the very thing we say we want…Joy.

When things are good in our lives, when things are flowing, when people start affirming us. I've had clients get a new car, buy a new house, repair their marriage, or even start a new career. And a lot of times each one of them says. "I'm just waiting for when things are going to hit the fan" in some variation— that's what they say.

I also hear "I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop” that right there makes me wonder are you actually in the presence of all of these abundances that are happening? Or are you too afraid that someone is going to take it from you? Many of us have people in our own family, that always have something to say—leaving us to feel rejected, abandoned or unseen. Which leads us to suppression.

Let them.

We can't even enjoy our blessings without mentally bracing for the backlash. Many of us were raised on this emotional frequency "if I'm thriving and if they're not, something bad is going to happen. I'll be punished, resented, ashamed. I'll be left alone.”

So what ends up happening when we never fully let ourselves feel good?

We end up staying 1 foot in chaos. 1 foot out of it. We start identifying with our fear responses instead of interrogating them.

The Algorithm Is the New Abuser

Now, here's where it gets wild. What's happening now —many are co-regulating with the Internet.

And this gets very dangerous.

The algorithm doesn't show you peace, it shows you what upsets you. Read that part back again.

Do we know why this is? Because what upsets us keeps us engaged. So now everyone's nervous.

Reactive.

Aggressive.

A lot of the trauma that we have is literally induced by the algorithm, and we don't realize it. It's been so normalized it's "just how the world is.” Sorry, but no—not for me it isn’t. That's how your nervous system responds to what your nervous system is fed. We are the ones that are feeding our nervous system what upsets us. The same way we're choosing the people that hurt us and break our hearts.

Beneath that, I’m noticing another layer: the way we cling to suffering as if it’s our badge of honor. As if enduring means we’re somehow good, worthy, safe. It’s become identity. I see it in clients of all ages — I see it in the generation before us, whose narrative was: if things were okay, you felt guilt or shame. Why do I deserve the good? they asked. So then the wounds became stories repeated, complaints recycled, as if the suffering itself proved something meaningful.

But what if peace is more vulnerable? What if the lake in stillness isn’t boring, it’s unfamiliar, scary. If suffering has become our currency, then calm is the unspent wealth. And the algorithm doesn’t want you to spend it; it wants you to stay unsettled. Because unsettled means engagement. So maybe the landing point here is this: what if we reclaim the feed for peace, not for panic? What if we retrain our nervous systems to feed what nourishes, not what agitates? The algorithm may be the new abuser but we still live in the body, still have the breath. And the choice to look away, quiet down, reclaim our rhythm, isn’t fantasy—it’s resistance.

When the Fear of Accountability Finds Sanctuary in Activism

From my vantage point, what I'm seeing a lot of is not just anxiety. It's actually emotional colonization. People are starting to feel threatened by your house, and your peace. The decorations that are on your walls. And the way that you express yourself. So they scroll by and demand that you rearrange your furniture to accommodate their needs. It's not because you've harmed them or you've done anything to them. But it's definitely because their unprocessed emotional pollution was activated by your freedom. So now what's happening is this were weapon therapy jargon, activism rhetoric, and diagnostic labels all to avoid the discomfort of doing that inner work that we all say we're doing we gaslight people under the name of awareness. And then we mock their boundaries, provoke reactions—and then, we're calling ourselves a victim when it gets mirrored back to us.

I need to understand how that is activism? Because I'm just not seeing it. It's looking a lot more like an addiction to avoidance and right now the world is High. On. It.

Stay in Your Lane. And Don’t Apologize for It.

For those of us that I've been feeling a lot more anxious in the last few years. Don't blame your brain. We gotta start checking the environment. If your joy feels dangerous, start checking your conditioning and maybe start checking the people around you as well. Notice, if you can see when someone tries to beat you into defending your homeless, walk away, cause you don't owe them shit. Because if we really think about it, peace doesn't need to be argued. It just needs to be embodied. And healing doesn't mean looking at what everybody else needs to heal. Sometimes it can look just like refusing to shrink because someone else can't regulate their own reaction to your light.

We don't owe anybody our reactivity.

We don't owe anyone our suffering.

And we definitely don't owe anyone our peace.