Healing anxiety starts not in those outer extremes, but in the calm center. In the middle ground. The middle ground is that place inside you where clarity lives. It’s where your body feels safe enough to relax. It’s where you notice your thoughts without needing to chase them. A powerful podcast awaits you, enjoy!
Healing Anxiety Starts in the Middle Ground: Why Extremes Keep You Stuck
When it comes to anxiety recovery, most people unknowingly operate from the outer edges of their emotional and mental worlds. One moment they’re feeling hopeful and energetic; the next, overwhelmed and hopeless. These constant swings—whether in thought, mood, or perception—aren’t signs of who you truly are. They’re signs of an overstimulated nervous system.
Here’s where healing anxiety starts, where the real insight begins: It’s where emotions can rise and fall like waves, without crashing into your identity. And most importantly—it’s where your true self begins to come through.
You may not realize how much of your anxiety is shaped by extremes.
Thoughts like “I’ll never get better,” or “I always ruin everything,” are not facts—they’re products of nervous system dysregulation. These kinds of thoughts feel urgent and real, but they’re distortions that arise when the system is stuck in fight, flight, or freeze.
So what does it mean to find the middle ground?
It means practicing presence without perfection. It means choosing not to follow every anxious thought down the rabbit hole. It means learning to pause before reacting and breathing through the urge to panic or fix. It means reminding yourself that healing anxiety starts with awareness—not control.
- In the middle ground, there’s space.
- Space to observe rather than absorb.
- Space to respond instead of react.
- Space to stop letting anxiety call the shots in your life.
Too often, people get caught in the false belief that recovery is about eliminating symptoms completely or feeling good all the time. But healing anxiety starts when you begin to trust that you can stay with yourself even during discomfort. That you can ride the waves without being pulled under. That you don’t have to choose between drowning in panic or escaping into numbness.
Real progress is quiet.
It happens in those moments where you don’t catastrophize that sensation. When you do notice a racing thought but let it pass. When you feel discomfort and breathe anyway.
If this idea resonates with you, and you’re ready to stop living at the emotional extremes, there’s so much more waiting for you in today’s podcast episode.
Click the play button above to listen now.
Because healing anxiety starts when you stop trying to fix every thought or emotion—and start learning how to be with them from a more grounded place.
Much love friend.
Dennis
The Anxiety Guy Podcast is one of the most popular mental health podcasts in the world with more than 20 million downloads alongside the Health Anxiety Podcast Show.
It has been selected as the top mental health and anxiety podcast on Apple 6 times, and has been listen as a top podcast for anxiety today on Psychology Today, Choosing Therapy, Better Help, Women’s Health, Marissa Peer and many more. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
Listen to all future anxiety guy podcast episodes on Spotify, Tune-in, Podbean, Podbay, Podcast Addict, Scribd, Luminary, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch all previous anxiety guy episodes through video on YouTube here.
