What Do You Do When Anxiety Starts to Spiral? This 3-Step Tool Can Help
The day I publicly announced my Courageous Living YouTube channel and newsletter on my social media feeds, I felt it. That little tornado (the one you know is coming before it arrives) was already starting to spin. Something small had gone sideways with my launch announcement, and instead of letting it go, I latched on. Hard. The anxiety spiral hit fast: irritability, the urge to cry, and then what Brené Brown calls the ‘vulnerability hangover’. Before long, my mind was running the old program. “What if I'm not good enough? What if this was a mistake?”
I'm a psychologist. I help people with exactly this. And I still got swept up.
Here's what I did about it — and what you can do the next time anxiety tries to pull you under.
Prefer to watch? Here's the full video:
How to Drop Anchor When Anxiety Pulls You Under — The ACE Method | Dr. Stephanie Best
When Something Small Grabs You Hard — Here's What's Really Happening
You've been here before. Something minor happens: a misread text, a moment that didn't land, a small thing at work. And suddenly you're hooked. Unreasonably upset. And some wiser part of you is asking, “Why is this hitting me so hard?” 🌪️
That curiosity, that instinct to dive beneath the choppy waves on the surface, is actually your inner compass working correctly. It knows that when a small thing grabs you with that kind of force, it's usually because it's touching something older and more tender underneath. Your mind is trying to make the discomfort about the more manageable thing, the detail that went wrong, the thing you can fix, rather than the more vulnerable thing lurking under it.
For me that day, the small thing was a display error on social media. The big thing underneath? Fear of being seen. Fear of failure. Fear that putting yourself out there means opening yourself up to finding out you weren't good enough.
The anxiety spiral isn't really about the trigger in the moment. It almost never is.
The Struggle Switch — and Why Turning It Off Is the First Move
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) there's a concept called the ‘struggle switch’. When it's flipped on, you're not just having uncomfortable thoughts and feelings — you're fighting them. You want to control them, shrink them, get rid of them. And that struggle, paradoxically, makes them louder.
My struggle switch flipped on hard that day. The message from my mind was clear: “Hide. Keep it together. Don't let anyone see how rattled you are.”
But there's no delete button in the nervous system. Once something's in there, you can't erase it — you can only change how you respond to it. Fighting the feelings doesn't make them smaller. It feeds them. If you've read about why pushing thoughts away makes them louder, you already know this dynamic — the same principle is at work here.
The move isn't to ‘fix’ the feelings. It's to stop struggling against them and find your footing while they're present.
Dropping Anchor: An ACT-Based Anxiety Grounding Exercise
This is where the ‘Dropping Anchor’ technique comes in. It's one of the most useful anxiety grounding exercises I know — built on a simple, honest premise: the goal isn't to stop the storm; it's to keep you from being swept away by it. ⚓
Think of it this way. When anxiety spikes and your thoughts start pulling you under, it can feel like you're a boat out at sea, getting tossed in the waves. Dropping Anchor, a core ACT tool, helps you come into harbor. The storm can still be happening. You're just not at its mercy anymore.
The tool is three steps, remembered by the acronym ACE. 🌿
A — Acknowledge
Rather than pushing away the thoughts and feelings, open up and acknowledge that they're there — ideally with some kindness. “I'm noticing that my mind is telling me the story that I'm not good enough. I'm aware of tension and anxiety in my body. I'm having the urge to hide.”
Just labeling what's happening creates a little distance from it. You're not being the anxiety — you're noticing it. That's a meaningful shift.
For me, this also meant telling my boyfriend what was going on instead of hiding it. Shared vulnerability is a bridge, not a weakness. I reminded myself, “It's okay to feel this,” and gently asked myself, “What if it could be okay to have this feeling right now?” 💛
C — Connect with Your Body
The anxiety spiral lives in your head — worst-case scenarios, old stories, imagined futures where everything goes wrong. Your five senses only exist in the present moment, so this step is about using them to pull you out of your mind and back into ‘right now’.
I took some deep breaths and asked if we could go for a walk. On that walk, I noticed the feeling of my legs moving, the wind in the trees, the sound of water trickling in a fountain by a pond. Nothing dramatic. Just present. 🌳
E — Engage
Once you've acknowledged what's there and reconnected with the present moment, you re-engage — from a place that's more grounded, more intentional, more you. Not the fear-driven version running the old program. The ‘you’ who knows what actually matters.
For me, that meant going back and finishing what I started. The part of me that had been genuinely excited about launching this channel, the part that wanted to reach the one person who might really need this, was still there. It hadn't gone anywhere. I just had to drop anchor long enough to find it again. 🧭
A Practical Takeaway for the Next Time the Spiral Hits
Think of a moment when your struggle switch tends to flip on — when anxiety starts spiraling and you go into hide or fight mode. What would it look like to turn it off? Not by trying to fix the feelings or talk yourself out of them, but by making room for them, dropping anchor in your body and your senses, and re-engaging from your heart.
ACE: Acknowledge. Connect. Engage.
It doesn't make the storm disappear. It keeps you from being swept away. And from that more grounded place, you suffer less — and you're able to make more intentional, values-driven choices about what to do next. ✨
P.S. If you're working on building this kind of psychological flexibility, this pairs well with understanding your 80-year-old self's perspective on fear — another tool for reconnecting with what actually matters when anxiety is calling the shots.
Ready to take the next step?
If something here resonated with you, I'd love to stay connected. Here are 3 ways to go deeper:
🌿 Download my FREE guided meditation — a practical first tool for the moments when anxiety gets loud.
💌 Join the Courageous Living newsletter — honest insights, tools you can actually use, and the occasional irreverent truth delivered to your inbox. No spam, no hustle culture.
▶️ Subscribe on YouTube — new videos every few weeks. Radically genuine real-talk psychology that's values-driven and always unscripted.
And if you're in a place where 1-on-1 support feels like the right next step, I'd love to connect. I'm a therapist in Charleston, SC who works with clients across the U.S. via PSYPACT — you can reach out here.
I'm a psychologist who helps people kick fear out of the driver's seat. And the day I announced this channel to the world, fear climbed right on into mine and told me I wasn't good enough. Here's what I did about it.
Rewind to a few weeks ago — the day I posted my public launch announcement about the Courageous Living YouTube channel and newsletter across every social media platform. Within minutes, my mind fixated obsessively on a small detail gone wrong on one of the platforms. Something that didn't show up quite the way I wanted it to. Nothing big, but boy, I was obsessing over it. I felt unreasonably upset by it. I couldn't seem to let it go. And I could feel this little tornado just spiraling and getting stronger inside of me.
My emotions were confusing. I felt upset. I felt a ton of irritability, like I might start crying. And then what Brené Brown calls the vulnerability hangover crept in. Before I knew it, the "what if I'm not good enough?" spiral hit hard. And perhaps you've experienced this before — where something that on a good day would be minor for you really grabs you. You are hooked. You're just so upset by it, and some wiser part of you is saying, "What's going on here? It can't just be about this."
Typically, that's a wise place inside of you. That's your inner compass pointing you to look underneath and see what else might be in there. That's your brain trying to protect you from something that probably feels like a much bigger issue — something that's been around for a really long time, something more vulnerable, more tender, a little more painful. Your soft underbelly. So your mind is trying to make it about this other, more minor thing that feels more controllable.
So I looked under. The vulnerability hangover crept in and all these old programmed stories — ones that have been around, gosh, almost my entire life it seems — came rushing back. What if I'm not good enough? Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of being seen. Really seen and known. Even though that's the most natural thing to crave. We humans yearn to be seen and known, but we also worry whether we're going to be good enough.
My struggle switch flipped on immediately. This is something in ACT we refer to when we're really struggling with our thoughts and feelings — when we're struggling with our inner experiences and we're not willing to have them as-is. We want to control them, influence them, shrink them, or get rid of them ideally. So my struggle switch flipped on. And it was telling me: hide. Hide from this. Fight the feelings. Certainly don't tell your boyfriend, who just came out on the porch to see how it's going. Keep it together. Don't let anyone see how crazy you are.
But there's no delete button in the nervous system. Once something's in there, you can't delete it. But you can change how you respond to it. And it took me a while. It was really hard for me to get out of my own way that day. But some part of me recognized what this really was: fear trying to take over again.
I turned the struggle switch off using something called Dropping Anchor. And this is a tool I want to teach you today because it can be so helpful. You know how when you're going through something like that — when you've got some powerful, uncomfortable, painful thoughts and feelings showing up inside of you — it feels like a storm is brewing within. A category 5 hurricane sometimes. And it can be so disorienting, like you are a boat out at sea getting tossed around in the waves. Dropping Anchor helps you come into harbor. It doesn't stop the storm, but it allows you to ground yourself and from a more centered, stable place be able to ride out the storm.
You can think of it and remember it by a three-letter acronym: ACE.
The A stands for Acknowledge. Rather than trying to push away the thoughts and feelings, open up and acknowledge that they're there — ideally with some kindness. I'm noticing that my mind is telling me the story that I'm not good enough. I'm aware of feelings of tension and anxiety in my body. I'm noticing that I'm having an urge to cry, or to get really irritable and rage against this storm. Just labeling — we've talked about that in a previous video.
Acknowledging your thoughts and feelings helps to validate you. One of the things I did in that process was open up and tell my boyfriend what was going on rather than hiding. I acknowledged it. And I reminded myself that vulnerability — shared vulnerability like that — is really the bridge. It's the way to connect with others. I showed up in line with my belief and value in authenticity, that being vulnerable and struggling is human and it's really okay. It was okay to feel that way. Sometimes I like to say to myself: what if it could be okay to have this feeling right now?
The C step is Connect with your body — ideally using the five senses, because they only exist in the present moment. It was all the mental horror stories going off — worst case scenario, movie theater in my head — trying to pull me into times in the past where I was afraid of failure, or into an imagined future where everything blew up in my face and I wasn't good enough and I got rejected. So grounding yourself in the present moment, where most of the time all is well, can help so much.
I did that by taking some deep breaths, by asking if we could go for a walk — which we did. On that walk, I noticed the feeling of my legs moving, noticed the wind blowing through the trees, stopped at a pond, and listened to the water trickling in the fountain.
Acknowledge the thoughts and feelings. Connect with your body to help yourself get a little more out of your mind and into the present moment where everything is safe. And then the E step is Engage — re-engage.
Once I got back, I re-engaged from a place that was more grounded, more intentional, more values-driven. This is what Dropping Anchor does. It doesn't make the storm disappear. It keeps you from being swept away by it. And in that grounded, safer place, you suffer less — which is quite nice. And you're able to make more intentional, values-driven choices about how to respond.
In my case, I knew I wanted to do this. The part of me that had been excited about posting a week before this happened was coming from a wise place inside — excited to share with all of you the things I've learned in 20 years of being a therapist and 50 years of being in Club Human. Excited to reach the one person who might hear this, who might really use the Dropping Anchor tool this week and help themselves suffer less. I knew there were goals of mine that required me to post. So I re-engaged from a values-driven place.
Acknowledge. Connect. Engage.
So think of a moment when your struggle switch flips on — or tends to flip on — in your own life, and you go into hide or fight mode. What would it look like to turn it off? Not by trying to fix the feelings — feelings don't need to be fixed — but by making room for them, then dropping anchor in your body and your senses, and re-engaging from your heart and your inner compass. That's the move. ACE: Acknowledge, Connect, Engage.
If you want a tool to help you come back to the present moment when anxiety spikes, I have a free guided meditation on my website. I'll put the link in the description — it's my gift to you for being here, and it's a good place to start. Thanks for listening today. I'll see you next time.
