Health & Wellness
Anxiety Tools That Don't Tell You to Just Breathe
I've spent a decade as a high-strung solopreneur trying to think my way out of anxiety. Russell Kennedy's body-first approach is what finally moved the needle.
I spent about a decade trying to think my way out of anxiety. I read the books. I journaled. I made decision matrices. I gave it frameworks. I tried to argue with it like it was a debate opponent.
It mostly didn’t work. The anxiety would lose the argument on paper and then come back at 3 AM anyway, completely unchanged. Because - as Russell Kennedy spends his whole book Anxiety Rx explaining - anxiety isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a body problem dressed up in thoughts.
I’m still anxious sometimes. I’m still figuring this out. But the body-first reframe genuinely shifted things for me in a way nothing cognitive ever did. I want to share what’s actually worked, in the spirit of “yeah, I’m still in the middle of this.”
The reframe that broke me open
Kennedy’s core argument is something like: anxiety is unresolved alarm in the body, and the thoughts are downstream. The thoughts aren’t causing the anxiety. They’re trying to explain it.
That was a hard sentence for me to absorb. I’d built my whole self-image around being a thoughtful, self-aware person who processed feelings through analysis. Realizing that decades of that analysis had basically done nothing for the underlying alarm - that was humbling.
The alarm shows up first. The thinking comes next, trying to make sense of why the body is panicking. So you find something to worry about. The taxes. The client. The kid. The launch. The relationship. Pick anything. The brain will find a reason because the body needs one.
But the body’s reaction isn’t actually about any of those things. The body is on alarm for older reasons. Cognitive content is just what’s around to attach to.
Why “just breathe” doesn’t work for high-strung solopreneurs
The “just breathe” advice isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just incomplete and condescending. It treats acute anxiety as if it’s a momentary state you can willpower out of.
For chronic, low-grade, freelancer-style anxiety - the kind where your nervous system is in a permanent state of mild fight-or-flight because you’re always one client loss away from a problem - breathwork in the moment doesn’t reach the underlying setpoint.
You can do four-seven-eight breathing for ten minutes and still be back at baseline-elevated by lunch. Because the baseline is the problem, not any individual spike.
This is the part I had to internalize. The work isn’t responding to anxiety attacks. The work is moving the resting state.
What started actually helping
A few things, slowly, over the last two years:
Noticing where the anxiety lives in my body. Kennedy is very specific about this. He has you locate the alarm - the chest tightness, the stomach knot, the throat closing - and just put attention on it without trying to fix it. Not in a meditative way. Just in a “what’s actually happening physically right now” way.
This is harder than it sounds. The reflex is to immediately spin into thoughts about why the anxiety is there. Staying with the body sensation - the actual physical thing - for even thirty seconds was something I genuinely couldn’t do at first.
Acknowledging the alarm before responding to it. “My chest is tight. I notice my chest is tight.” That’s it. No fixing. Just naming. Sounds dumb. Has worked better for me than years of journaling.
Stopping the cognitive content from running. When the brain starts the thought spiral - what if the client cancels, what if the project fails, what if, what if - I now try to recognize: this is the brain trying to assign meaning to a body state. The thoughts feel urgent. They aren’t actually about anything new. They’re the same alarm wearing different costumes.
I’ve written about the related territory in stress management for people who can’t just breathe through it. This post is the next layer in - the version for when the stress has become chronic.
The hardest part: not all anxiety is about “the situation”
This was the most uncomfortable realization. A lot of my anxiety wasn’t about the things I thought it was about. The freelance stress, the client worries, the launch panic - those were real, but they weren’t sufficient explanations for the amount of anxiety I was carrying.
The body was running an old program. The current circumstances were just the most convenient hook for it to attach to.
That sounds woo-woo. It’s not, in Kennedy’s framing - he’s explicit that early-life patterns and nervous system development create a baseline that adult circumstances tune slightly up or down but rarely fundamentally change.
So the work isn’t fixing this client situation or that money situation. The work is calming the underlying system that uses those situations to express itself.
I’m still in the middle of this. I don’t have a triumphant story to wrap it up with.
What I’d tell another anxious solopreneur
If you’ve been trying to think your way out and it isn’t working - try the opposite. Pay attention to the body first. Not to relax it. Not to fix it. Just to notice what it’s doing.
The tools that have helped me, in roughly the order they helped:
- Locating the physical sensation when anxiety spikes (chest, stomach, throat, jaw)
- Naming it in a sentence: “there’s tightness in my chest right now”
- Letting it be there for 30-60 seconds without trying to manage it
- Recognizing the cognitive spiral as the brain’s response to the body, not the cause
What didn’t help, despite years of trying:
- Productivity hacks for managing anxiety (sometimes useful, but not the cure)
- Breathwork as a primary intervention
- Mindset reframing in the middle of an attack
- Arguing with the anxiety on its own terms
None of this replaces therapy. Mine got serious about a year ago and I’d recommend it to anyone in the same boat. The five-minute journal hack post jokes about it. I mean the underlying point seriously. Some of this requires professional help.
Where I am now
Less anxious than I was two years ago. Still more anxious than I’d like to be. Still figuring out what works.
What changed isn’t that I conquered anxiety. It’s that I stopped treating it like a thinking problem. The body got included in the conversation. And once it was included, the conversation got more useful.
If you’re a high-strung solopreneur reading this and the “just breathe” advice has been frustrating you for years - yeah. Same. There’s a different door in. It’s not as clean as the books make it sound. But it’s there.