Overcome Anxiety & Take Back Control From Fear | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

28 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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Caroline Cavanagh argues that anxiety stems from feeling out of control. You can't control external events like losing a pet or finding a spider, but you can control how you interpret them. Shifting focus to the cat's memories instead of the loss, or seeing spiders as fascinating rather than threatening, gives you back a sense of control and quiets the fight-or-flight response.

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When you're in full control, there's no anxiety, but when you have very little control, that's when anxiety tends to rise. So with all these, we look about how can you take back control. You can't control losing a cat, but you can control what you reflect on, whether it's the loss or whether it's all the love that she had had over those 15 or so years. Again, with a phobia, one of the reasons people are so scared of spiders is because they move so quickly and they make you startled. That instigates the fight-or-flight response. So again, we can look at how can you take back control. You can't control the spiders, but again, you can control how you see them. They're just little 8-legged phenomenal creatures actually, and by changing that perspective can really help reduce the anxiety.