I Overcame Anxiety and Healed 30+ Years of Insomnia and Chronic Fatigue
How To Overcome Anxiety and Heal Your Nervous System
Who Is This Article For?
This blog, in general, is for people who experience conditions driven or maintained by a nervous system that has become stuck in a protective, threat-oriented state—whether fatigue, brain fog, pain, hypersensitivity, intrusive thoughts, unusual sensations, anxiety, even overworking and an inability to be relaxedly present, and others.
The perspective shared herein is not medical advice and is not a substitute for appropriate medical evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment. It applies to symptoms that arise from nervous system dysregulation, should always be considered alongside proper medical care and supervision, and is merely my experience and that of people I’ve coached through their recovery journeys.
Now that we got that out of the way… I hope you find this truly helpful.
The Messenger You Can’t Outrun: Why Avoiding Anxiety Keeps You Stuck
The nervous system can learn — or be rewired into — a completely different response.
That’s what this post is about.
Hi, I’m Daniel Shai.
For more than thirty years I lived with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and insomnia. Like most people in that position, I spent years trying to get rid of my symptoms. I wanted the fatigue gone. The sleepless nights gone. The pain gone.
It took me quite a while, but eventually I discovered something that completely changed the direction of my recovery.
I learned that my relationship to my symptoms matters far more than the symptoms themselves. And not only my relationship to the symptoms, but also to my fear and anxiety about my symptoms.
I’ve seen firsthand that the nervous system can learn — or be rewired into — a completely different way of responding.
And when that happens, people often gradually discover a new baseline—not because they fought harder, but actually because they stopped fighting.
It’s odd that when it comes to a nervous system producing difficult symptoms, victory is had through surrender.
As you continue to read posts from the Rested and Free Substack, I’m sure the true meaning of this will become clear to you.
Let’s get right into it, then. Here’s one of the most important principles I learned throughout my recovery journey.
Where Real Change Happens
Real healing begins at the point where we’re willing to move toward the very experience we’ve spent years trying to avoid.
That sounds backwards.
If anxiety shows up, naturally we want it gone. We search for the right thought, the right breathing exercise, the right distraction, the right technique—anything that will make us stop feeling anxious.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting relief. The problem is that when our entire strategy, consciously or unconsciously, is avoiding anxiety, we unintentionally maintain and intensify it.
Here’s why.
Anxiety Is a Messenger
Imagine you’re living thousands of years back. You’re leaving your village to hunt. But you could also be hunted. You come to a bend, and your survival instinct warns:
“What if there’s a predator around the bend?”
That’s anxiety. And it made sense, as a protective survival mechanism that keeps us alert when there is potential danger.
Today’s nervous system, however, often activates when there is no real threat, causing us to experience the moment as if we need to fight or flee for survival when we’re actually completely safe.
It mistakes a perceived threat for a real threat. To put even more clearly, it mistakes unpleasant for dangerous.
Certain nervous systems register certain experiences, such as losing out on sleep, feeling exhausted, experiencing pain, having intrusive thoughts, experiencing odd sensations — as threats.
It learns that from us — from how we respond to those experiences.And that’s important, because it also means we can teach it another way to respond.
Let me share an example from my personal story about how I taught my nervous system to treat discomfort as threat.
My insomnia began in childhood, when I couldn’t sleep well one night and had a terrible next day.
I feared so much having another day like that, and the pressure I put on myself to sleep well the following night backfired.
Now, I’d developed a fear of not sleeping, along with a fear of feeling so fatigued and drained.
My nervous system learned to treat both as threats.They weren’t real threats, they were perceived ones.
But I was intent on avoiding them, whatever it took.
That was the beginning of my insomnia and CFS.
I dreaded the unpleasantness and my nervous system learned to treat it as threat.
Once the association is learned, anxiety starts warning us every time there is a possibility those unwanted experiences might occur.
For someone struggling with insomnia, this often begins when the sun starts setting, if not earlier on in the day...
This type of anxiety is often felt before thoughts or words accompany the sensations: The nervous system tightens because the perceived threat (potential loss of sleep) is approaching. It doesn’t need a thought to tell it to tighten, it has already learned from how we responded to the undesirable experience in the past.
But thoughts do come, and they often ask:
“What if tonight is another bad night?”
Or, “How will I get through this?”
An internal dialogue often ensues.Really, an inner-battle, as the mind steps in to try to figure out how to avoid the experience.
We want to be able to control what happens. Accepting, allowing, or welcoming the experience doesn’t register as an option.
Anxiety is, naturally, a problem-solver, as its function is to help us avoid disaster. It envisions the worse, and tries to get us to protect ourselves against it.
Why Avoiding Anxiety Keeps It Alive
Here’s the thing: Anxiety itself, when it arises frequently, becomes one of the unpleasant experiences that we want to avoid. We don’t try to avoid only what the anxiety is trying to warn us about, but the anxiety itself. We develop anxiety about anxiety.
That’s because the nervous system learns to perceive threats from how we respond to experiences. We teach it that anxiety is a threat by how we respond when it appears.
If every time anxiety arrives we immediately try to escape it, suppress it, argue with it, or make it disappear, the brain concludes that anxiety is a threat. This is how we become anxious about anxiety.
Now, the situation is such that anxiety, the messenger, wants to warn us about a perceived threat, but we don’t want to listen to the messenger — we want it gone.
Since, as far as the brain is concerned, our survival is at stake, it concludes:
“I’d better get their attention because there is potential danger ahead, so I’ll intensify the signal.”
Now it warns us earlier. Louder. More often.
This is one reason anxiety can become so persistent. The messenger has a message to relay, it is set on protecting us, and it will relay that message.
You cannot outrun this messenger.The more you try to avoid it, the more you not only maintain it — you intensify it.
But while we can’t escape anxiety, we CAN end our struggle with it.
The Shift That Changes Everything
Recovery doesn’t happen because anxiety disappears. Recovery happens because your relationship with anxiety changes. Instead of treating it like an enemy, you begin treating it like a messenger. A messenger whose information may be outdated.
You must understand that the more you run from it, the more anxiety continues to run you.
Not because I say you must, but because that insight helps tremendously to succeed in doing what needs to be done: stop running.
That’s when the big change happens.
It can take a while to learn this surrender, this non-avoidance or not-running, because the instinct is to avoid feeling anxiety. Which, as explained, actually fuels it.
Remember, though it may be intensely unpleasant, anxiety isn’t dangerous. It will not harm you.
A feeling cannot kill you. Though, if you’ve experienced intense fear before, you know it can feel like it can.
Now, armed with this information, do your best to remain still and allow the messenger to relay his message.
Keep in mind that anxiety is a part of you that is looking out for you. Its message may be outdated — after all, it’s warning you about an experience that may be quite uncomfortable but isn’t dangerous — yet your nervous system will only learn that if you begin to respond differently when anxiety arises.
And something remarkable begins to happen when we lean in and allow the messenger to relay his message: the messenger leaves.
The anxiety calms down significantly.
But it’s important not to get attached to that as an outcome, because then listening-to-the-messenger becomes yet another avoidance tactic.
We cannot guarantee an immediate outcome, but if we genuinely stop avoiding anxiety (or any other symptom we fear), we are certainly headed for recovery.
But it’s not always easy to learn exactly how to listen to the messenger.
We want to listen to it neutrally. Meaning, we’re just listening — not agreeing, nor disagreeing and trying to argue against it. We literally sit in the anxiety, knowing we are safe (since it will not harm us), and do nothing. We let the wave wash right over us, without responding.
Now, what does this teach the nervous system?
Our survival instinct feels heard. So it doesn’t need to keep bugging us or intensify the signal (the anxiety) to get our attention. It’s job is complete, and it can leave now.
We listened but we knew we were safe and did not identify with the message, which means we were aware of the brain’s alarm without being alarmed.So the brain begins to suspect that there is no danger lurking ahead. It begins to understand that its message might be outdated.However, there will need to be repetition of this, because the brain needs total assurance that we are safe.
Hyperarousal, the high alert state that threat produces in the nervous system, decreases. It will continue to do so every time we welcome anxiety rather than try to run from it or fix it with all kinds of methods and techniques.
Stillness or non-doing is the best cure, but accompanied by a correct perspective about anxiety, which is what this post aims to provide you with.
Without being properly informed about what anxiety actually is and how it works, it can be quite difficult to be still when the wave rises.
But there’s one more step:
After you’ve let the anxiety rise and subside while holding still, go and do something else.
Eat, watch a show, create something, talk to a friend (about other things).
This behavior of non-dwelling on the anxiety and the thing it warns us about further teaches the nervous system that there really is no threat.
If you heard the message and went to do something else rather than bracing against the threat you’d been warned about, then the brain must conclude that the message it had for you it outdated.
Normally, you would make plans and efforts to avoid the unpleasant experience anxiety is warning you about. Or you’d try to escape the anxiety itself.
But now, you’ve shifted your response.And the brain and nervous system now begin to adjust.
Pot of Gold: The Same Approach Applies to Whatever Your Condition Is
At this point, it is important to state that recovery requires not only working with our anxiety, but also shifting the way we respond to whatever it is we fear — whatever the anxiety is warning us about. (There is more to recovery, like working through some emotional/psychological aspecs that arise, and future posts will discuss this!)
For some people that thing is anxiety itself. For others it may be fatigue, intrusive thoughts, dizziness, certain pains. For someone with insomnia the fear that need be faced rather than bypassed is often wakefulness at night.
The basic principle of healing the nervous system remains the same:
Don’t avoid, lean in.
When someone with insomnia has reached a point in their recovery path where they are willing to experience wakefulness at night, they’re recovery is not only well underway, but they are building immunity.
They are not bypassing but moving right through their fear of wakefulness, which is why it will never have such a hold on them ever again.
But as long as they try to bypass it, its hold on them remains.
When someone with intrusive thoughts stops trying to fix and get rid of them, and they come to that same stillness with them that I’d described in regard to anxiety, their loop gets interrupted.
With chronic fatigue, the feared experience is often overwhelming exhaustion.
With chronic pain, it’s the pain itself.
With intrusive thoughts, it’s the thoughts.
With dizziness, hypersensitivity, or brain fog, it’s those sensations.
Each condition has its own version of “the thing around the corner.”
The nervous system keeps warning us because it believes those experiences represent danger.
As recovery unfolds, we gradually teach it otherwise—not by forcing symptoms away, but by becoming less afraid of their appearance. We do that by not running when they arrive. Not fighting nor fleeing.
Can you see how this ends the fight or flight response?
When the willingness to stop resisting is reached on our recovery journey, the shift is often felt — even if symptoms aren’t quick to show improvement. (See my video about The 7 Stages of Recovery if you’d like to know how the path progresses from this point).
It hardly matters what the nervous system condition is (remember, this Stack is for nervous systems locked in threat and protection mode, not only specific conditions) — avoidance maintains the issue, while leaning into it shifts it.
It takes courage. Lots of it. We’re essentially talking about standing still in your fear. Learning not to fear fear. To not be anxious about anxiety. To no longer need to avoid what is uncomfortable, but to allow it fully.
Quick Recap of What To Do Before We Conclude:
When anxiety appears, you might internally say:
“Thank you. I know you’re trying to protect me.”
Whatever it’s warning you about may be uncomfortable, but uncomfortable doesn’t equal dangerous.
There’s an enormous difference.
Once the nervous system slowly discovers that distinction through experience — not just intellectually — it begins to stop sounding the alarm so aggressively.
And reaching that point requires a journey. Because even when we hear this wisdom and it makes sense to us, applying it can be tricky. Many of our avoidance tactics are quite unconscious.
That’s where a recovery coach is often invaluable. Especially if they’d gone through the recovery journey themselves.
Practical Example: Nighttime anxiety appears for the insomniac, but the work isn’t to make it disappear.
The work is to let it be there. To acknowledge it. To allow it. To stop treating its presence as a problem that needs immediate fixing.
You don’t have to enjoy it. You don’t have to force yourself to feel calm. You simply stop arguing with the messenger.
Then, you continue with your evening. You heard the message. You just didn’t organize your life around it.
Learning occurs not through convincing yourself, but through experience.
This isn’t an overnight process. It’s nervous system retraining. And like any kind of learning, repetition matters.
The Threat Was Never What You Thought
Eventually, something beautiful starts happening:
You realize the messenger wasn’t warning you about a real threat, but a perceived one.
Your fear was conditioned.
That’s an incredibly freeing realization when you see the unreality of your fear. This is the basic idea behind exposure therapy — meeting the fear rather than running away.
It doesn’t mean symptoms disappear overnight. It means they lose much of their power over you.
It’s kind of like realizing you created a big monster out of something that wasn’t inherently dangerous.
But it’s not coming from a dismissal of the issue or an attempt to avoid it — it’s coming from direct insight, which happens only when you face your fear.
Often, when we move through our fear, we realize it was made of misinformation.
That misinformation came from treating something that isn’t a threat as though it was one.
And when this becomes clear to our bodies, it means we’re already approaching a new baseline.
It’s the beginning of lasting change.
The Real Recovery Work
Did this post resonate with you?
As mentioned, this article isn’t meant to capture the entire recovery process.
While things appear nice and clean in article format, the real work is often more messy, and resistance is often hidden.
If you’re struggling with insomnia or another nervous-system-driven condition and would like guidance applying these ideas to your own situation, you can learn more or book a session HERE.
Recovery isn’t about never experiencing unpleasantness, or doing away with anxiety once and for all.
It’s about teaching your nervous system that the things it fears most were never truly dangerous to begin with.
It’s about being able to experience discomfort without entering into battle-mode. Without bracing.
Without catastrophizing.
After all, it’s those very responses that cause the nervous system to tighten, and that’s when it produces and intensifies the symptoms we want to get rid of.
As I said, it’s odd, but victory is had through surrender. I am here to accompany you on the journey toward that surrender.
Below is a recap of the principle: Don’t Avoid, Lean in. You can save it, perhaps, and keep it as a reminder. Also, don’t withhold this information from people who might benefit. This post is free, so feel free to share it.
Wishing you all the best,
Daniel 🌻
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