The invitation arrives. A baby shower. Twenty-five people. Your closest friend.

And before you've even decided whether to go, your brain is already working.

How far is the venue? Where are the exits? Can I sit near a door? What if my stomach acts up?

You haven't said yes yet. But you're already planning your escape.

If this sounds familiar—if you've spent years sitting near doors, wearing layers to hide sweating, scanning for bathrooms, monitoring your heart rate for early warning signs—then what I'm about to share might change everything you think you know about managing anxiety.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: the strategies you've developed to protect yourself? They're the very things keeping you trapped.

The Safety Behavior Trap

Let's look at what happens when you use your safety strategies and nothing bad happens.

You sit near the exit at a team meeting. Your heart races a bit, but you get through it. You survive.

But here's the question most people never ask: Why does your brain think you survived?

Think about it. According to your brain, what saved you?

The exit. The cardigan hiding the sweat. The strategies.

So your brain concludes: We got through it because we had our safety equipment in place. Good thing we planned that escape route.

And here's what your brain never gets to learn: that the situation was actually safe. That you would have been fine anyway.

Research on anxiety shows this is exactly how safety behaviors maintain the problem. When you use a protective strategy and nothing bad happens, your brain attributes safety to the strategy—not to the situation itself. The threat never gets disconfirmed.

It's like carrying a lucky charm. Every time you bring the charm and nothing bad happens, you credit the charm. You never discover that the charm was never doing anything—that you were safe all along.

But there's a second machine running. And this one is even more invisible.

Why Monitoring Your Symptoms Makes It Worse

You mentioned monitoring yourself for signs of a panic attack. Checking your heart rate. Noticing if you're starting to sweat. The logic seems sound: catch it early, get out before it gets bad.

But here's what happens when you constantly scan your body for danger signs.

What state is your nervous system in?

Alert. On edge. Waiting for something to go wrong.

And when you're on edge, what happens to your heart rate? Your breathing? Your sweating?

They increase.

You're creating the very symptoms you're looking for.

Studies on hypervigilance show this creates what researchers call a "forward feedback loop." The monitoring designed to protect you is actually generating the danger signal. It's like having a smoke detector so sensitive that the heat from its own battery sets it off.

So now we have two invisible machines running:

• The Safety Behavior Trap: Your protective strategies prevent your brain from learning that situations are safe
• The Monitoring Loop: Scanning for symptoms creates the symptoms you're scanning for

Both feel like protection. Both are maintenance systems for the very thing you're trying to escape.

The Truth About Fear of Fear

Here's something that might surprise you.

When you've walked out of meetings—several times—what exactly were you escaping from?

Not the meeting. Not the people. Not even the room.

You were escaping from the panic. The racing heart. The feeling of being trapped. The sweating.

You were escaping from the feelings.

The anxiety itself had become the threat.

This is what clinicians call "fear of fear." Your brain has learned that anxiety is dangerous—something to escape from. And here's where it gets counterintuitive: this fear of anxiety is often the primary problem, not the situations themselves.

You're not afraid of the baby shower. You're afraid of how you'll feel at the baby shower.

Why You Need to Feel the Anxiety

So if safety behaviors maintain anxiety by preventing learning... and monitoring creates symptoms through feedback loops... and escaping reinforces the belief that anxiety is dangerous...

Then what actually works?

The opposite of everything you've been doing.

You have to feel the anxiety.

Not fight it. Not escape it. Not monitor it. Feel it.

This sounds wrong. It sounds like the worst advice anyone could give someone struggling with anxiety. But here's what the research shows:

For your brain to update its threat assessment, it needs to experience anxiety AND see that nothing terrible follows. Every time you escape, you rob your brain of that learning opportunity.

Think about it this way: you've been leaving the movie right at the scary part—and never seeing the resolution. Of course your brain thinks the monster wins. You've never stayed to watch it defeated.

Twenty years of evidence that anxiety feels awful but doesn't actually harm you. Yet your brain hasn't updated. Why?

Because you always bail before you can find out. You never let the anxiety run its course. You never get to see it come down.

Here's what happens if you stay: anxiety peaks, then naturally decreases. Your body doesn't have unlimited adrenaline. It physically cannot maintain peak anxiety indefinitely.

But you've never experienced that. You've always left right when it peaked.

How Playing It Safe Cost You Your Career

There's one more piece to this.

That promotion you didn't get. The feedback: your work is excellent, but you're not visible enough.

What would visibility require?

Presenting. Speaking up in meetings. Travel. All the things your safety strategies have helped you avoid.

Twenty-one years of excellent work. And your anxiety gets the credit for your limitations, not your abilities.

The same walls that felt like protection have also been a prison. The strategies that kept you comfortable have kept you invisible.

If that makes you angry—good. Let that anger tell you something about what you're ready to change.

How to Face the Baby Shower Without Your Exit Strategy

So what does this mean for the baby shower?

It doesn't mean you have to white-knuckle through agony. But it does mean trying something different.

Instead of sitting near the exit: sit somewhere else. Let your brain experience "no easy escape" and discover that you don't need one.

Instead of leaving when anxiety peaks: wait. Ten minutes. Just to see what happens. To watch the anxiety crest and—eventually—come down.

Instead of monitoring for symptoms: notice them without treating them as emergencies. Your heart is racing. That's information, not a fire alarm.

Yes, you'll feel anxious. That's not the problem. That's the point.

Your job isn't to not feel anxious. Your job is to feel anxious and stay anyway, so your brain can collect new evidence.

Clinical guidelines call this the gold-standard approach for anxiety—and for good reason. Research shows it produces large improvements. Not because it eliminates anxiety, but because it teaches your brain that anxiety isn't the threat it believed it was.

What Happens When You Stop Fighting Anxiety

Fighting anxiety tells your brain it's worth fighting. Worth running from. Worth all these elaborate safety systems.

When you stop treating it like an enemy, your brain starts to reconsider whether it's actually a threat.

The strategies that made sense when you were just trying to survive might not serve you now that you're ready to thrive.

So start small. The baby shower is coming up. One hour without the exit as your safety net. Ten minutes of waiting when you want to bolt.

Not to prove you're strong. Not to tough it out.

But to let your brain finally see how the movie ends.

What's Next

How do I actually build the ability to stay with discomfort when every instinct tells me to run? What specific techniques can help me tolerate anxiety during the moments when escape feels essential?

This raises an important question: understanding WHY you need to feel the anxiety is one thing. Actually building the ability to stay when every instinct screams "run" is another. What specific techniques help you tolerate discomfort in the moments when escape feels essential?

That's where the real skill-building begins.