Your anxiety is well-intentioned and wants to help you.
I’ll explain.
First off, you need to understand that we haven’t physically evolved since the last ice age. This means we’ve still got all of the same impulses that kept us alive during a time when we were being hunted by wild animals.
In response to this danger, we needed a strong fear reaction. It would cause us to run away, escape predators and survive. And while we were escaping or hiding from those predators, we needed an emotional state that would keep us awake and hyper aware of any form of danger. This was anxiety.
In a sense, it is like a very loud alarm system on a house. It is designed for people living in dangerous war torn countries, and it’s supposed to go off when there’s a fire, or burglars are trying to break in, or there’s a bombing. The house you live in, though, is in a relatively safe neighbourhood, there’s not a high likelihood of anything truly dangerous happening, BUT life is complicated and does get difficult sometimes, so maybe you get a big energy bill in the post, or an unwanted visitor knocks on the door. In response, that very loud alarm goes off, and it does that because it recognises some kind of threat and doesn’t have a quieter, more appropriate alarm to fall back on.
It often helps to at least start from this realisation; the reaction is there because it thinks you’re in danger, and it wants to keep you safe.
So how do you turn that alarm off? A lot of people try and do that by getting frustrated and yelling at it. This is a pretty understandable reaction, especially if the alarm is going off constantly and stopping you from sleeping. This doesn’t work, though, because anger and frustration is just a slightly different type of alarm. Anger is the ‘fight’ response that would give our ice-age ancestors a burst of energy to fend off predators. So in this metaphor, it’s like trying to turn off the house alarm by installing an electric fence and sleeping with a baseball bat under the bed.
The only viable option is to contact the manufacturer and have a conversation; the manufacturer would be your subconscious, because that’s the one who’s in charge of these involuntary responses. They have the alarms actual software in front of them, and they can reprogram it if communicated with correctly.
They’ll have some very good reasons why the alarm needs to be set up like this; maybe there was an attempted break-in a long time ago and that made them feel like they needed to be particularly vigilant. Maybe they’ve seen some terrible tragedies and they want to be extra prepared in case anything like that happens to you. So you’ll have to have a conversation wherein you can calmly hear their side while advocating for yourself and making your needs clear. They won’t disconnect the alarm, but they will eventually reprogram it so it works in a more appropriate way.
This is why I have leaned so hard on the ‘house alarm’ analogy; the subconscious responds particularly well to metaphor. This is a big part of what hypnosis is.
The subconscious communicates in indirect ways, like setting off a loud alarm; when we communicate back, we also need to be indirect, because that is how we know it will understand.
This is why, instead of demanding that the alarm be turned off, we tell the manufacturer stories about how a big energy bill may seem scary at first, but ends up getting paid. Or how when people knock on the door, it is often friends dropping by for a visit. By showing these things to the subconscious, we show it how it is safe, and why there is no emergency.
Of course, we can never truly turn the alarm off, but we can get it to the point where it only goes off when appropriate. And should the day ever come when a burglar tries to break in, we would be glad of something loud that would scare them off.