Anxiety as Messenger
Accepting the message from anxiety as a way to finally pay attention to your Self
Anxiety as Messenger written by Bren Littleton
She wakes in the night with her heart racing, chest tight, thoughts tumbling one over the other. There is no sound of danger. The house is quiet. The neighborhood is still. Yet her body surges with alarm as if she is standing at the edge of a cliff. Many of us know this moment. Anxiety slips into the dark like an intruder, uninvited and unexplained.
We have been taught to see this as a flaw. Maybe our brain chemistry is broken, maybe our willpower is weak, maybe we just aren’t strong enough. The cultural script is harsh: if you feel anxious, something is wrong with you.
But Dr. Gabor Maté turns this script on its head. To him, anxiety is not weakness or failure. It is a message. It is the body remembering. It is the nervous system speaking on behalf of truths that were silenced, boundaries that were ignored, or safety that was never guaranteed. The symptoms we try to push away are not accidents. They are signals. The question is not, “How do I eliminate this?” but “What is this trying to tell me?”
Maté’s work begins with the simple but radical recognition that early stress wires the stress response itself. Long before children can form words, they are already learning what safety feels like. A caregiver’s nervous system is the child’s first environment. If the parent is anxious, depressed, or overburdened, the child’s body absorbs that atmosphere. A steady voice and calm breath teach the infant to rest. A distracted gaze and tense shoulders teach the infant to brace. This imprint becomes the foundation of the nervous system.
Once born, a baby relies completely on the caregiver for regulation. A baby cannot soothe itself. It borrows calm from the caregiver’s presence. When that presence is interrupted—by trauma, exhaustion, depression, or the sheer demands of survival—the infant adapts. The body does what it must. It learns to stay alert, to scan for danger, to hold tension in muscle and breath. This adaptation is what we later call anxiety.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies (ACEs) confirm this picture. Across large populations, researchers found a clear link between early adversity and later struggles with anxiety, depression, and chronic illness. The more adversity, the higher the risk. This is not destiny, but it dismantles the myth that anxiety is a private defect. It shows instead that anxiety is a survival response that can become chronic when nothing changes in the environment.
Maté extends this insight into illness. In his book When the Body Says No, he shows how the body communicates distress when the psyche can no longer carry the burden alone. Illness is not random in this view. It can be the body’s final attempt to speak when a person has been silenced or when culture demands endurance without reprieve.
He tells of a woman who never allowed herself to cry and developed rheumatoid arthritis in her forties, her joints locking as her spirit had locked away grief. He tells of a man who carried family and work without ever showing vulnerability and was diagnosed with cancer, the disease embodying years of swallowed anger. These are not morality tales. They are human truths. The lesson is not that people cause their illnesses. The lesson is that the body reveals where life has become unsustainable. Read this way, illness offers a kind of difficult wisdom. Anxiety belongs on the same continuum. It is often the early warning system, the trembling before the storm. Left unattended, it can harden into breakdown. Listened to with care, it points us back to the places that need repair.
Anxiety also sits inside the loop of addiction. Maté is known for asking not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” Many who live with anxiety reach for substances or behaviors that provide short-term relief: alcohol, food, scrolling, sex, gambling, work, perfectionism. These are not the root problem; they are attempted solutions. Condemnation does not heal these patterns. Compassion and curiosity do. When we ask why the pain, we are asking where the anxiety began and what it has been carrying for all these years.
This compassionate stance does not dismiss medicine. Maté critiques a model that stops at “What is it?” and fails to ask “What happened?” or “What does the body remember?” Yet he respects that diagnosis and medication can help. His clinical answer is what he calls Compassionate Inquiry, a method that helps people notice present sensations, implicit memories, and the beliefs that keep the nervous system on high alert. Instead of fighting anxiety, clients learn to ask what it protects. The work is to befriend the guard at the door, to understand why it has stood there for so long, and to let it rest when safety is finally real.
Relationships, too, are central to how anxiety is shaped and healed. With psychologist Gordon Neufeld, Maté shows how disrupted attachment lays the groundwork for lifelong worry. When the bond between parent and child weakens through divorce, distraction, overwork, or cultural myths that prize independence, children often turn to peers for belonging. Peers, however, cannot provide unconditional safety. The result is an anxious paradox: children become intensely attuned to acceptance and status, yet their bonds remain fragile. In adulthood this pattern often ripens into people pleasing, hypervigilance, and over-functioning to avoid rejection. Anxiety whispers constantly, “Love is fragile. Do not risk losing it.” Maté reframes this not as pathology but as adaptation. The anxious adult is still the vigilant child who learned to keep connection alive by staying small. Healing requires new bonds where safety is steady and authenticity is welcome—in therapy, in friendships, in community, in partnerships that can hold the whole story. Anxiety softens when the nervous system finally learns it is safe to rest in love.
Maté’s work also widens into culture. In collaboration with Indigenous communities in Canada, he explored ayahuasca-assisted therapy for trauma and addiction. Participants often reported that anxiety lifted not because any substance erased it, but because connection was restored—connection to body, to community, to ancestors, to spirit. In many Indigenous traditions, anxiety is not treated as a disorder but as a sign of imbalance. It signals broken bonds with family, with land, with meaning itself. Plant medicine is powerful in ceremony because it restores those bonds. The lesson is universal: anxiety thrives in isolation and heals in belonging. Therapy can help. Community can help. Nature can help. Ceremony can help. The nervous system calms when we remember that we are not alone.
Recognition has followed because these ideas change practice. In 2018, Maté received the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for reframing trauma, addiction, and anxiety not as defects but as conditions that have history and context. His influence reaches healthcare, education, parenting, and public discourse. He helped shift addiction treatment toward trauma-informed care by teaching that substance use is often an attempt to manage anxiety. He taught parents and teachers to see anxious behavior not as defiance but as a plea for connection. He insisted that cultural norms that glorify exhaustion and deny vulnerability create widespread nervous system strain. Healing, therefore, requires both personal work and cultural change—not one without the other.
Readers often ask him what to do. His guidance unfolds in four braided strands that belong together rather than sit in a list. He begins with the body: notice where anxiety lives, and do not treat it as an enemy. Place a hand on the place of tension and ask, “What is this sensation protecting? What need have I silenced?” Let the answer come slowly and meet it with compassion rather than judgment. He turns to relationship: seek or repair connections that offer true attunement. When we know our feelings will be received and our boundaries respected, the nervous system stops bracing for impact. He turns to culture: resist the productivity trap. Slow down in small concrete ways. Reclaim rest, nature, and authenticity as necessities rather than luxuries. An anxious culture cannot raise calm individuals. Finally he turns to spirit: restore belonging to something larger—through prayer, meditation, ritual, or unhurried time outdoors. Anxiety eases when we feel held by more than our own effort.
This fourfold approach is what makes his work both practical and whole. Anxiety is addressed in the body, in relationships, in culture, and in spirit. It is not a flaw to eliminate but a messenger to hear.
written by Bren Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025