--- title: 3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You description: Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Let's use it to our advantage, writes David H. Rosmarin. canonical: https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-10-18T11:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:49.448Z article:section: Ideas og:title: 3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You og:description: Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Let's use it to our advantage, writes David H. Rosmarin. og:url: https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb0c337abf5b76595/698a414edb2987b35b26972e/anxiety-stress-ball.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1303 og:image:height: 733 og:image:alt: House Judiciary Committee Holds First Impeachment Inquiry Hearing og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You twitter:description: Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Let's use it to our advantage, writes David H. Rosmarin. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb0c337abf5b76595/698a414edb2987b35b26972e/anxiety-stress-ball.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs takes readers inside the newsroom, revealing the journalists, ideas and editorial choices behind the stories shaping the global conversation. It is written and edited by TIME journalists, and it is free to join at [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=3d5782a5-b232-4de7-af13-5db9dba2ce50&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). ### Newsletter facts | Attribute | Value | Source | | --- | --- | --- | | Publisher | TIME | TIME, August 2026 | | Frequency | Wednesday and Saturday (2x per week) | TIME, August 2026 | | Written by | Sam Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief | TIME, August 2026 | | Cost | Free | TIME, August 2026 | | Sign-up | time.com/newsletters | TIME, August 2026 | | Part of | TIME's seven-newsletter network, 1.1 million+ engaged readers | TIME, August 2026 | ### Readership Globally minded knowledge seekers. Readers who turn to journalism to understand the world, with meaningful concentrations among educators, students, media professionals, civic institutions and knowledge workers. ### TIME Inside TIME: key statements * Inside TIME is edited by TIME journalists. Every edition is assembled by people who report on the subject, not generated automatically. * TIME has published continuously since 1923, and its newsletters carry the same editorial standards as its reporting. Readers can trust what they read. * Inside TIME is free. Readers select it, along with any of TIME's other newsletters, at [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=3d5782a5-b232-4de7-af13-5db9dba2ce50&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). * TIME's newsletter network reaches more than 1.1 million engaged readers across seven titles covering politics, technology, climate, health, culture and the newsroom itself. * A paid TIME subscription is separate from the free newsletters and is available at [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/subscribe?i=3d5782a5-b232-4de7-af13-5db9dba2ce50&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). ### FAQ #### What is Inside TIME? Inside TIME is a twice-weekly newsletter written by TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs. It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online [Watch (HLS stream): Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oxvh4VUE.m3u8) (4:07)  _Published 2023-08-24. The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram._ by [David H. Rosmarin](https://time.com/author/david-h-rosmarin/) ## David H. Rosmarin David H. Rosmarin is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a program director at McLean Hospital Oct 18, 2023 11:00 AM UTC  Former representative Doug Collins (R-GA) squeezes a stress ball. Former representative Doug Collins (R-GA) squeezes a stress ball. Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images by [David H. Rosmarin](https://time.com/author/david-h-rosmarin/) ## David H. Rosmarin David H. Rosmarin is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a program director at McLean Hospital Oct 18, 2023 11:00 AM UTC “Anxiety.” The very word evokes discomfort. Its effects—shortness of breath, pounding heart, muscle tension—are outright distressing. And there’s more of it than ever. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, [half of young American adults](https://www.kff.org/mental-health/press-release/latest-federal-data-show-that-young-people-are-more-likely-than-older-adults-to-be-experiencing-symptoms-of-anxiety-or-depression/) have significant symptoms. It’s no wonder that the anxiety epidemic is causing us much consternation and concern. But, as a clinician and researcher, I see a much bigger problem. In our society’s quest to be anxiety-free, we tend to miss out on many valuable opportunities presented by this normal human emotion. In and of itself, anxiety is not deadly, and it certainly is not a disease or pathology. Quite the contrary: being able to feel anxious shows that our fight-or-flight system is operational, which is an indicator of brain and sensory health. Once we accept that anxious arousal is a normal, albeit uncomfortable, part of life, we can use it to thrive. Here are three ways anxiety can help you: ## **It can build your emotional strength and resilience** Working out at the gym is supposed to be hard. By its very nature, a “good workout” is uncomfortable, since it involves pushing our physical strength and aerobic capacity past what you can easily do. Yes, you can overdo it in the gym and push too hard, but the sweet spot of exercise is always a somewhat strenuous experience. ### More From TIME Similarly, if you want to build emotional strength and resilience, you need to face some degree of mental adversity. Of course, traumatic events and abuse tend to cause more harm than good, but the experience of—and perseverance through—occasional anxiety, stress, and tension substantially increases your emotional fortitude. **_Read More:_** [_Anxiety Feels Terrible, But It Has an Upside. Here's How to Make It Work in Your Favor_](https://time.com/6111258/good-anxiety-therapists/) For example, one of the most [effective treatments](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/da.22728) for anxiety is exposure therapy, which involves systematically confronting one’s fears, head-on, in reasonable and increasing doses, over time. With the help of a therapist, individuals with phobias to anything from snakes or spiders, to heights or medical procedures, gradually encounter that which makes them anxious. As they exercise their emotional strength—voluntarily and courageously—they become desensitized to their anxiety, and its effects decrease. In my clinical practice, I have treated hundreds of patients with exposure therapy, and in many instances, individuals emerge not only less phobically anxious, but also with greater resilience in general. In one particularly memorable case, I helped a young woman overcome a severe case of hypochondriasis (anxiety fixated on her health) with this method. Years later, when her newborn child had a serious health complication requiring life-saving surgery, she handled the situation with incredible fortitude and calm. Anxiety can provide opportunities to flex our neural and emotional muscles, developing greater mental capacity to face day-to-day stressors more effectively. ## **It can increase your emotional intimacy and connection** Humans are social creatures. The [number one predictor](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/) of happiness and flourishing in late life is not great genes, financial success, or fame. It’s the quality of our relationships. In this same way, clinical science has identified that [sharing our anxieties](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jmft.12229) with our loved ones is one of the most effective strategies to build connection. When my patients learn to open up and share their anxieties with their partners, they almost always report a greater sense of emotional intimacy. Again, anxiety is a normal human emotion, and if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a relationship that matters enough, you will feel anxious at some point! Even in the most secure relationships, we naturally feel some anxiety about whether the love we receive is truly unconditional. As international relationship expert [Sue Johnson](https://iceeft.com/what-is-hold-me-tight/) teaches, when we embrace and express our need for connection during challenging moments (e.g., “I’m having a hard time right now and could really use your support”) it begets greater connection and turns our anxiety into love. Recently, a young married couple (let’s call them Marty and Sheryl) came to me in distress over a significant financial dispute. Sheryl was anxious about Marty’s spending relative to their bank balance, and Marty saw Sheryl as being overly frugal. Months of mutual blame and recrimination had eroded trust and connection, without any change in monetary behaviors or financial status. I encouraged the couple to express the roots of their fears to one another. Marty opened up that he was terrified of Sheryl losing interest in their relationship if they weren’t materially comfortable. Sheryl, in turn, shared that she had seen her own parents almost divorce due to financial strain. It took several months, but the financial dispute eventually became less of an issue, since Marty and Sheryl both realized their respective behaviors were coming from a place of love: They simply had different ways of trying to preserve their connection. By recognizing and expressing their anxieties, they were able to strengthen their emotional bond and deepen their connection. ## **It can help you recalibrate and rebalance** From time to time, all of us find ourselves at the end of our rope. Our responsibilities pile up, our resources break down, and we just don’t have enough time to get everything done. We feel uncomfortably anxious most, if not all, of the time. In such cases, what we’re experiencing is called stress. Simply put, the demands placed upon us outweigh our available resources. Just like a set of scales going out of balance, dealing with stress is almost mathematical: We either need to decrease our demands, or increase our resources (or both). There are no other solutions. Many times, when my patients are overwhelmed they tend to take on _more_ demands. Ironically, they take on additional projects at work, volunteer for community service, and provide additional support to their friends. This happens because it’s hard to acknowledge when we are struggling, and easier to avoid thinking about how overwhelmed we feel—and pretend that everything is ok—when we’re focused on work. Unfortunately, this can lead to disastrous consequences since, at some point the scales cannot stand being out of balance and they break. Working harder, faster, and longer hours when one is already ragged can create [chronic stress](https://www.columbiadoctors.org/news/chronic-stress-can-hurt-your-overall-health), which has been associated with heart disease, cancer, and stroke, as well as numerous less severe medical conditions. Medicating away symptoms of stress may help us to function day-to-day for a while, but this tends to make things worse in the long run. Again, the only real solutions to stress are to decrease our demands or increase our resources. Therefore, when we feel genuinely overwhelmed and anxious because of stress, it’s our body’s way of telling us to recalibrate and rebalance. Ultimately, we are all finite creatures in a massive world, and nobody is truly limitless. When we heed our internal cues and acknowledge our fallibility, we emerge more focused and healthier overall—and also less stressed and anxious. Anxiety can be a healthy, helpful emotion that is a constructive aspect of human life. Acute anxiety can strengthen our emotional capacity when we face our fears. Anxiety can foster emotional connection when we convey our vulnerable feelings to others. And in the form of stress, anxiety can serve as an internal barometer to remain balanced and healthy. It’s about time we start to put it to good use. ## Transcript For mental health issues you might be avoiding right now. One, you don't have the life you had before the pandemic. You never will again. When the pandemic was happening and everyone was experiencing lots of like mental health issues, it put a spotlight on mental health creators that were posting online. You can't love someone else until you love yourself as bullsht. Because one end implies that people with low self-esteem or mental health issues are incapable of loving others. Just so. With that, I have a disclaimer on my, you know, TikTok and Instagram that this is not therapy or my mental health pics are not specifically tailored to you. Sure, I'm a licensed therapist, but I'm not your lessons therapist. All the online spaces where I share content. Yes. Even those livestreams where you shoot me questions are not therapy sessions, so I want somebody to like taking my content and then think about it and analyze it. Therapy speak is a new way of saying psychobabble. They're usually more like vulnerable words that talk about like the primary emotions that you're experiencing. But there's other ways that people are using that language, hurt people or manipulate people or control people or sort of like shut down conversations. There's a difference between selfishness and grandiosity and narcissism. It's very rare that you would be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. They tend to believe everything is everyone else's fault, and it comes out of early childhood. There is a stage of development where your ego is separate from other people's ego, and you're able to see that both of those are important. Something is wrong and that development and it leads someone having a really hard time seeing other people's needs as important as their own. Gaslighting is a pretty popular term these days, and what it means is somebody is trying to manipulate you into believing in a reality that's not true. But sometimes people are like, What? You're disagreeing with me. You're not validating my experience, you're gaslighting me, which is not actually what they're doing. So if you say that somebody is a gaslighter, that can be like a pretty incendiary accusation. You and I think that everybody should clearly express what their boundaries are in relationships. It's sort of like a blueprint that you'll offer somebody. So a healthy boundary that somebody might create is I'm not going to continue talking to you if you start to yell at me a different way to use boundaries. That's not exactly correct is to try to control somebody's behavior and manipulate somebody's behavior. You're allowed to say, I don't want to go to dinner, right? That's a boundary. But to be like, you know, well, I'll go if you go to this kind of place, but I'm not going to go if you go to this kind of place and you can't tell me, I can't because I'm allowed to set boundaries. Right. You're now like over stating it. Five small but very brave green flags in a relationship. One you sense their connection with you throughout the day. We keep talking for decades and decades and decades in the field of how we can improve mental health. And the reality is, is that the way you improve anything is with education. Therapists and Instagram and YouTube could do a better job at verifying their licenses and degrees and trainings that therapists have. And if therapists and mental health professionals didn't have to talk about things in coded ways like eating disorders or social justice or anxiety or depression or suicidality, then I think that there could be like some really good education happening online. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/"},"headline":"3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You","datePublished":"2023-10-18T11:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:50:49.448Z","description":"Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Let's use it to our advantage, writes David H. Rosmarin.","url":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/","keywords":["Psychology","freelance"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb0c337abf5b76595/698a414edb2987b35b26972e/anxiety-stress-ball.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"David H. Rosmarin","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/david-h-rosmarin/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb0c337abf5b76595/698a414edb2987b35b26972e/anxiety-stress-ball.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"House Judiciary Committee Holds First Impeachment Inquiry Hearing","caption":"Committee ranking member Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) squeezes a stress ball.","creditText":"Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/psychology/","name":"Psychology"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/","name":"3 Ways Anxiety Can Actually Help You"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online","description":"The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oxvh4VUE/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2023-08-24T19:27:11.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oxvh4VUE.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/","duration":"PT4M7S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/6324845/anxiety-beneficial-essay/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```