Everybody talks about anxiety these days. But what exactly is anxiety? 

While there are many ways to  define it, we like to use a single, simple definition:

It’s the feeling of feeling unsafe.

When we talk about fear, or feeling afraid, it’s almost always a fear  of something specific and tangible. You’re afraid of the dark, for example, or public speaking, or death, or spiders. But anxiety is a more fundamental feeling that you’re not safe, regardless of the circumstances. For some reason you feel like something bad – you’re not sure what – is going to happen to you.

While we usually think of anxiety as emotional or psychological, it’s almost always a very physical, visceral experience.  Because you feel unsafe, your body reacts exactly as it would if you really were in danger. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase, your breathing gets shallower, and blood is sent from your stomach to your limbs to prepare you to run. You go on “red alert,” scanning for danger. 

These physical feelings of being in danger then signal your mind to think thoughts of “I’m unsafe, I’m in danger.” These thoughts, in turn, send messages back to the body to intensify the physical feeling of red alert. That’s why anxiety attacks and panic attacks – and even more typical anxiety reactions – can come on so quickly and be so overwhelming.

Why does this happen? Because keeping you safe – that is, alive and unharmed – is your body’s prime directive. The fear circuits are very well-developed. They’ve been streamlined to work extremely quickly and strongly – much more quickly than our rational minds.

Anxiety, then, can be set off whenever we feel physically unsafe for no clear reason. But it also gets set off – perhaps even more often – when we feel emotionally unsafe.

Why does this happen? Even though we’ve been told by our culture that “mature” adults don’t “need” other people, the truth is, we human beings, whether we’re five or 75, are hard-wired to depend on the people closest to us to help us survive. For that reason, feeling that we are unacceptable to the people whom we depend upon – or that they’ll desert us if we ever really need them – sets off the same kind of danger signals as hearing the footsteps of a tiger in the bushes. We  don’t feel safe emotionally.

What can you do if you feel chronically anxious, and either physically or emotionally unsafe? Here are some tips:

Say hello to your anxiety

Feeling unsafe is a scary emotion! You may tend to either get overwhelmed by your feelings, or else try to tell yourself not to feel that way. But red alert feelings don’t just go away. They think they’re your loyal bodyguard sworn to keep you alive. Who are you to tell them to put down their guard? Tell them to go away and they just might lock you up for your own safety.

So you must first acknowledge them. Say to yourself, “I’m anxious. That must mean I’m feeling unsafe.” Notice, when you do this, that you get a little bit of a “click” inside, a little bit of easing, like your bodyguard relaxed a little.

If you have big physical sensations, notice them too. Talk to yourself about what you’re feeling. It will help them not be so overwhelming. If you’re in private, describe what you’re physically feeling out loud. “I’m noticing my heart is beating fast. I’m noticing my breath is short. And there’s a tight pain in my chest.”

There’s a natural tendency to be afraid of these sensations, because if you really were in danger, these sensations would be indicating a life-or-death situation. Not to mention they can get rather unpleasant! But if you’re not in any immediate physical danger, you can “ride” the feelings. Notice them, let them rise and fall. You’re on your own roller coaster! In his first Inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We’d like to amend that a bit and say, “The only thing you have to fear is the fear of fear.” See if you can feel the fearful sensations and not fear them. 

Notice, also, what “movie” is playing in your mind. You may have vivid images and stories about what’s going to happen. Notice what the movie is telling you.

Listen to your bodyguard

If your bodyguard is warning you of danger, you have to listen to what it has to say. Is it afraid of many things? Is it telling you that a lot of bad things are going to happen? Go ahead. Let it tell you what it’s protecting you from. Then thank it for its loyal service in working to protect you. 

In fact, you might want to take out a notebook, a tablet or just a piece of paper, and write down what it told you, like you would if you were dealing with a real security guard who was informing you of potential dangers.

Time to soothe your bodyguard

But here’s the thing. Your bodyguard may be correct that you’re in danger. Or it may not. Believing your bodyguard unquestioningly is probably not going to help you.

Because your bodyguard may not be a smart, 6’6” guy in sunglasses and a headset tuned into headquarters. It could be your inner six-year-old self.

What do you do with six-year-olds who are afraid of the dark and monsters under the bed?

You don’t say “Don’t be silly! There are no monsters under the bed. Go to sleep right now, or else!”

You listen to their fear. You turn on the light. You look under the bed, and maybe invite them to look with you. Perhaps you check behind the wall posters, too, and leave a dim night light on. And you reassure them calmly and soothingly. “I don’t see any monsters. But don’t worry – if anything scary comes around, we’re right here to protect you.”

If you’re a grownup, you can do that to your inner self. Acknowledge the fear, then realistically reassure yourself. “You can tell the very anxious part of you, “Yes, some things are scary. I know I’m afraid of losing my job, but realistically that’s not likely to happen. And even if it did happen, we’re still going to be okay.” Then say out loud to yourself the reasons you know you’ll be okay, even if the fearful part of you doesn’t feel it.

If you do this, take a moment to notice how the anxious feelings calm down a little.

Create an emotional safety net around you

The best way to feel safe is to have emotionally safe people in your life. That’s part of our basic blueprint as human beings.

Emotionally safe people are people whom you can turn to when you feel vulnerable, and with whom you don’t feel afraid to be yourself. 

Unfortunately, when people feel chronically emotionally unsafe, their inner bodyguard gets extremely protective. The prime directive, remember, is survival. So, taking the attitude of “better safe than sorry,” the bodyguard sees practically everyone as dangerous, and either stays away from them or pushes them away. The problem is, by never allowing anyone to feel truly “safe” to you, your bodyguard prevents you from getting the one thing that would give you a sense of emotional safety. 

So creating an emotional safety net is both an “inside” and an “outside” task: Finding some people who are emotionally safe, but also recognizing the people who can (or want to) be emotionally safe, and taking small risks to build your circle of safety.  

Want to learn more about how to create an emotional safety net for yourself? Click here for four tips to help get you started. 

The best way to feel safe, secure, and “whole”—capable of facing whatever challenges life may bring you—is to have emotionally safe people in your life. That’s a basic part of our blueprint as human beings.

Emotionally safe people are people whom you can turn to when you feel vulnerable, and with whom you don’t feel afraid to be yourself. 

Unfortunately, when people feel chronically emotionally unsafe, their inner bodyguard gets extremely protective. As we noted in previous articles, the prime directive of all life is survival. So, when a chronic lack of emotional safety takes hold, the inner bodyguard, taking the attitude of “better safe than sorry,” starts to see practically everyone as dangerous, and either stays away from them or pushes them away. The problem is that by never allowing anyone to feel truly “safe” to you, your bodyguard prevents you from getting the one thing that would give you a sense of emotional safety. 

So creating an emotional safety net is both an “inside” and an “outside” task: Finding some people who are emotionally safe, but also recognizing the people who can (or want to) be emotionally safe, and taking small risks to build your circle of safety from the inside out.

Here are four tips to help get you started. 

Look around for the people who accept you. Think of the people in your life (at home or at work) who, when push comes to shove, really do care about you and support you, even if they don’t always get it right. If they’re not nearby, call them up.

Take small risks to open up. Share a vulnerable feeling, such as  “I’m nervous,” “I’m scared” or “I’m sad,” without blaming the other person for making you feel that way. In an emotionally safe relationship, whether with a friend or an intimate partner, sharing a vulnerable feeling will naturally elicit a caring response, as long as the other person doesn’t feel blamed or that what they can give won’t be enough. The act of sharing vulnerable feelings with a friend or partner in a non-defensive way and getting empathy in return – and in turn, responding empathically to someone else’s vulnerable feelings – builds your emotional safety net. 

Ask your bodyguard to stand close, but not step in right away. The moment you feel scared and vulnerable, your bodyguard will probably want to take over. But you don’t have to tell your bodyguard to go away (you probably couldn’t, anyway). You can ask your bodyguard to stand to the side and watch while you try to do something new and different. 

Learn to discern – and learn to forgive. It’s true that many work and social environments really aren’t emotionally safe, and some people really aren’t safe and never will be. That’s when it’s better to protect yourself. But most people are somewhere in the middle. Accepting, understanding and forgiving the flaws and lapses of the people closest to you allows them to relax more and draw closer to you, which in turn will make you feel safer (and more loved) by them. 

“Emotional safety?” exclaimed George, one of our clients. “What are you talking about? No one’s got a knife here. No one’s carrying a gun. No one’s about to fall off a ledge. You can’t walk around worrying about getting your feelings hurt all the time. That’s not the way life is!”

George has a point. Emotional safety does sound rather “soft.” Life isn’t easy, people aren’t always nice, and growth often happens when people go through hardship and adversity. Haven’t we all learned we’ve got to toughen up, have a thicker skin, not let things get to us, in order to get through the hard times without breaking?

All that is true. And yet, despite that – or maybe because of it – emotional safety is still important. In fact, it may be the most important thing, for you, for me, for George’s wife and kids, and for George as well. Without emotional safety, you can’t love well, or even live well. If you don’t feel emotionally safe when you’re with someone, you can’t feel close, and you don’t feel good.

This might sound terribly boring and stifling, like you can never say or do anything that might make someone feel uncomfortable. But that’s not what emotional safety is all about. 

So what is emotional safety? It’s actually fairly simple and straightforward. To begin with, it’s a visceral feeling – that is, something you feel in your body. Specifically, it’s the feeling that, in this moment, with this person or these people or in this place, you don’t have to feel scared to be really you.

That’s it. Emotional Safety is vitally important to feeling okay. And the lack of it is at the core of many emotional and societal problems.  

The Evolutionary Roots of Emotional Safety

Why is emotional safety so important? It starts with an even more elemental need: physical safety. 

For every creature on Earth, from an amoeba on up, the prime directive is safety. Food and procreation are important, but survival tops the list. To survive in an environment full of things that can kill you, you need a very well tuned system for staying safe. 

It’s true that many people, particularly young men, are drawn to adventure, risk-taking, and testing the limits of what they can safely do, but for the most part, survival, with its concomitant need to maintain safety, is still our most powerful instinct. 

Safety and survival, for all living things, involves a combination of two strategies: avoiding danger as much as possible, and, when you haven’t been able to avoid danger, responding to the danger in the way most likely to keep you alive. 

We’re hardwired to avoid danger—to avoid what we fear is going to cause us pain. And if we haven’t been able to avoid that threat, we’re hardwired with four ways to deal with it. 

1. We can fight as hard as we can against it (especially if we’re trying to protect the ones we love)
2. We can try to get away from it
3. We can freeze in place to the point of barely breathing (hopefully so we won’t be noticed by the potential attacker)
4. If all of those fail, we can “go dead.” 

The last is because many predators won’t eat carrion – that is, animals that have already died – and going dead may also reduce the pain of being attacked and killed.

The freeze response – that is, tensing up and barely breathing – is often the first reaction to sensing danger. 

We human beings are among the most defenseless and vulnerable creatures on the planet. We have no claws, no sharp teeth, no quills, and we can’t even run very fast. For the first 12 years of our life, and certainly for the first six, we can barely protect and take care of ourselves at all. We evolved one primary way to stay safe, and that is by staying physically close and connected to a group of other human beings. 

It’s easy to forget this in our modern world, where we can live as alone as cats and still be safe and get our physical needs met. But this “modern” way of living is not what we’re designed for. 

In order to stay connected and work together for such long periods of time – usually, in the past, for entire lifetimes – we needed to develop a way to maintain such a close-knit system and to know when it wasn’t working. That system, the thermostat for keeping the whole thing going and keeping us alive and safe, was and is our emotions. Our emotions – love, anger, fear, sadness and happiness, shame and disgust – are the coins we exchange to hold each other close, or to tell each other when something has gone wrong to break the connection. 

Emotional safety for us, then, is tied to physical survival itself. It’s very very real and very very deep. 

What Happens When You Feel Emotionally Safe

When you feel emotionally safe with someone, your heart rate and respiration go down and even synchronize with the other person. Perspiration, a sign of stress, is reduced. The muscles in your body relax.You’re likely to express more of your thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative. You can better tolerate physical pain when they’re with you. 

Since emotional safety is a feeling, if you have it with someone, you know what it feels like. George feels it most with his “little” brother Tom, two years younger than him. He can go fishing with Tom and barely say a word for hours, but still feel totally at peace. Tom was the one person other than his wife that George turned to when his son was in the hospital, and Tom came through for him.  

Emotional safety with at least one person and preferably a few more is what you need to feel okay in your own skin, and to venture out into the new and the unknown.  

The Impact of a Lack of Emotional Safety

Lack of emotional safety happens when you feel rejected, abandoned, physically threatened, emotionally attacked, humiliated or held in contempt, for feeling the way you feel, thinking the way you think, or being the way you are. It is to feel unacceptable, unlovable or worse by those around you, those most important to you or those whose survival you depend upon. 

Lack of emotional safety can also come from simple lack of physical touch and comfort.

When you don’t feel emotionally safe, you feel emotionally threatened, and it causes the same tensing of the breath and musculature as the freeze response. Feeling emotionally threatened for a period of time without a return back to safety, acceptance and belonging is to live in what essentially feels like a constant state of physical threat.

Most of us know what this feels like as well. It may have happened growing up, or with your partner, or at a job or two..These experiences usually leave scars, sore spots, and emotional triggers – tender places that are inordinately painful whenever they are touched, awakening the original hurt below them. Most of us have an instinctual, reflexive reaction, of which we may be barely aware, to avoid doing or feeling anything that could cause that awful feeling to happen again, even though denying what is truly “us” usually comes at a high personal cost. 

This can be hard to accept. Our culture tells us that we should be “strong” and “independent,” that we should be able to “get along” without other people, and that we can rise above the feeling inside us of not belonging, not being okay just as we are. It tells us that it’s “weak” to feel hurt. 

But all around us we’re seeing the danger of people, especially our young people, not feeling embraced, protected and wanted just for being who they are. We have made competition our god, we have classified and categorized the people around us, even children, into winners and losers and ignored the basic human need and right to feel accepted and worthwhile by the people around them. Then we wonder why some people break.

When people feel chronically unsafe, their emotions become heightened to where those emotions feel overwhelming, and even frightening, to themselves and others. People who feel chronically cut off from others and unsafe can feel, and sometimes become, unsafe to others. 

But when people feel emotionally safe, their emotional system calms down, and they become saner.

We Need to Build More Emotional Safety

Now is a time when building more emotional safety – in ourselves, our families and our communities – is critical, possibly more critical than it’s ever been in our lifetime. For this reason, this article will be the first in a series that will be written over the next two months on how you can increase emotional safety in your life and in the people around you. 

For today, let us leave you with this: The first step to building more emotional safety in your life is to realize that you and everyone around you, including men like George, need it more than you, or they, think. And emotional safety comes when we treat each other with care. 

It doesn’t mean never expressing anger, or never (for many of us, though not all) playfully teasing. It’s about creating homes and communities where our true human experiences, in all their beauty, joy and tragedy are freely spoken and lovingly welcomed, honored, held and embraced. It’s about respecting the vulnerability of your own heart, your partner’s heart, and indeed, every human heart.

For the heart, as much as it is resilient, is a very tender organ. 

What does “emotionally successful” sound like to you? Is it the ability to maintain grace under pressure? To walk into all kinds of social situations calmly and confidently? To find and keep a really healthy, loving relationship? To have emotional balance through all the ups and downs of life?  

These all sound like great ways to be. Who wouldn’t want to be like this? But how do you get there? If you’re like most people, you probably figure that people who are like this were either born this way, had awesome  childhoods, or achieved it through years of personal growth and arduous effort at eliminating, or at least drastically quieting, all their distressing, upsetting and painful emotions.

Perhaps there are lots of people who have reached emotional success in exactly these ways. But maybe the path to emotional success, at least for many of us, is not through quelling all our disturbing emotions to achieve a Zen-like state of imperturbability. It’s not how we grew up, it’s not how we’re built, and it serves neither ourselves–nor the people we care about–to try to achieve it. For us, maybe the best and truest way to become emotionally successful is not to try to overcome our emotional selves. Rather, it is to become successfully emotional. 

Successfully emotional? What in the world could that be? Everyone knows that people who are successful aren’t emotional, and people who are emotional aren’t successful. The moment you get emotional, you’re no longer effective, right?

But maybe we should ask why. After all, everyone, at their core, is emotional. That’s just a fact: For all our ability to think, human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures. Though we may not be consciously aware of it, every single thing we do, every action we take, is sparked by, and fueled by, our emotions. 

Admittedly, some of us live our lives with our feelings seemingly much closer to the surface than the people around us. But haven’t most of us gone through times when our emotions were not so easily put aside, no matter how calm and even-keeled we normally may be?

Yet in a world that sees people’s feelings as an inconvenience and a bother to the “important” business of life (not to mention the bottom line), more emotional people are often looked down upon compared to those who are calmer, cooler and seemingly unaffected by their emotions.

Emotions, as we all know, can be used in destructive and self-destructive ways, which is partly why they’ve gotten such a bad rap. But, just as there is constant social pressure to be thinner, we are surrounded by the message that any emotional distress or upset is “dysfunctional” or “dysregulated,” something to be embarrassed about and solved by taking meds or telling them to a therapist. And letting any of these feelings show to anyone beyond the people in our closest inner circle is even worse. 

The result is that we live as though strong unpleasant emotions in adults don’t exist—until they explode, sometimes in the most tragic ways. Few of us learn how to feel or deal with any difficult emotion caringly and constructively, whether it’s our own or anyone else’s.

But what if your everyday emotional register feels too strong to fit comfortably within this narrow standard? We argue that there are great strengths to having easy access to the heights (and yes, depths) of your emotions. Those who are successfully emotional have learned how to make all of their emotions work for them rather than against them – and for the benefit of the people around them as well. 

Here are seven habits that successfully emotional people use:

1. They listen to their emotions, all of them, as if to a friend, and use them for guidance.

Most people think of their difficult emotions as something that just “comes over” them, so they either react from them, without thinking much about them, or try to push them aside. But successfully emotional people have learned to value and trust their feelings, listen to them as they would a friend, and consult them for guidance. That includes all their feelings—the good, the bad and even the ugly. They aren’t afraid of their emotions, believing that all of them, even the ones they don’t like, may have something important to share with them. 

2. They don’t think their feelings, they feel them. And they don’t just ‘follow their feelings.’

This may sound counterintuitive, but most of the worst feelings people experience occur from the attempt not to feel. If you accidentally touch a hot stove, you reflexively pull your hand away. Likewise, when we suddenly experience a stinging emotional pain, we reflexively pull away not to feel it. But the things we do not to feel that pain, however, are usually not so innocuous. We may lash out at others, or numb ourselves in countless ways, or attack ourselves with self-attacking thoughts. In this way, many if not most of what we think are our worst emotional experiences and reactions are in fact generated by the thoughts in our minds, which make us feel “awful” but are disconnected from our bodily-felt sensations, which is what we’re really feeling inside.

Successfully emotional people have learned to make a distinction between their true bodily-felt feelings inside, and all the thoughts and judgments about the feelings that take over and generally make feelings harder to deal with. They’ve learned to feel what they feel. This makes it easier to handle even the strongest emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them. 

At the same time, successfully emotional people realize that feelings often don’t have the whole story. They don’t say, “because I feel it, it must be true.” They acknowledge their feelings as feelings, while also questioning their assumptions. They pay attention to other information and their own reasoning, especially when they sense that their feelings are leading them in the wrong direction.

3. They’re open, honest and transparent.

Since hiding what they feel is fairly pointless anyway, successfully emotional people turn this quality into a strength by learning to be forthright. They send clear emotional signals to the people around them, whether it’s their boss, coworkers, family, friends or spouse. They don’t make others try to figure out what they’re feeling. And they make a point of sharing good feelings as much if not more than negative ones.

4. But they’re not transparent with everyone.

Successfully emotional people have learned (sometimes through painful experience) not to over-share. They can and will withhold their feelings when they sense that a person won’t be receptive or will hold it against them.

5. They don’t just express their feelings, they communicate them.

The verb “to express” comes from the Latin “to press out.” From a yell of fright to a declaration of love, we’ve all had the experience of having feelings pressing inside us that had to be expressed. Successfully emotional people feel that same need, maybe even more so. But they know it’s only half the equation. Successfully emotional people are good communicators of their feelings. They convey what they feel, want and need in a way that the other person can receive. Communicate derives from words more ancient than Latin that mean “share in common.” They make a point of not “unloading” what they feel, but sharing what they feel and making it common with the person they’re sharing it with. One of the primary ways they do this is by listening in return, which leads to the sixth habit.

6. They understand, respect and value other people’s feelings as much as their own.

Many people who are more emotional were dismissed, ridiculed and rejected for their “over-emotional” nature beginning in early childhood. This left them either apologetic or defensive about their feelings, afraid of how other people react to them. But successfully emotional people have grown beyond this defensive stance. They’ve learned to respect, care about and actively listen to other people’s feelings, even when they conflict with their own, without feeling threatened or overwhelmed. They apply the same positive and welcoming attitude toward other people’s emotions, including difficult ones, as they do to their own.

7. They create emotionally safe environments for the people around them.

1. Successfully emotional people make great bosses, supervisors and team leads because they truly believe that the feelings and needs of the people who work for them really matter. Their openness and emotional clarity create a humane and emotionally safe work environment. Workers feel cared about, and work gets done more cooperatively and with less stress because the workers don’t have to play games to deal with their resentments or get their needs met.

A moment’s glance at the daily news shows that we desperately need more emotionally successful people—people able to handle the stresses, strains and inevitable losses of life and continue to give, grow and love. In addition, among those who are emotionally successful, our culture, and our world, need a great many more people who are successfully emotional—people who are driven by their own deep and perhaps once barely manageable feelings and desires to help others break down their walls to communicate and connect more deeply, more honestly and more caringly. Successfully emotional people have turned the vulnerability of their emotional selves into their greatest strength. They feel acutely when something is wrong, when the status quo isn’t working or isn’t healthy. But they respond not with outrage, helpless resignation or withdrawal, but with resolution, great compassion, and love.