Imagine you are walking through a field and you suddenly step into a patch of quicksand. Your heart seizes with panic. Your immediate, primal instinct is to fight. You thrash your arms, kick your legs, and struggle with all your might to pull yourself out.
But as anyone who has seen an old adventure movie knows, this is the worst possible thing you can do. The more you struggle against the quicksand, the faster you sink. The very act of fighting it is what gives it the power to pull you under. The counterintuitive secret to surviving quicksand is to do the opposite of what your instincts scream at you to do: you must stop fighting, lean back, and allow the substance to support you. You must learn to float.
Anxiety is mental quicksand.
When the feelings of panic, worry, and dread arise, our natural instinct is to fight. We struggle, we resist, we try to thrash our way out of the feeling. We tell ourselves, “Stop feeling this!” or “I have to get rid of this anxiety!” But this internal struggle only makes us sink faster. The resistance is what gives the anxiety its power.
There is a better way. It is a simple, ancient practice that teaches us how to stop struggling and start floating. It is the practice of non-judgmental awareness.
The Paradox of Control: Why Fighting Your Anxiety Fails
The reason our fight against anxiety is always a losing battle lies in a well-documented psychological principle sometimes called the “white bear problem.” If I tell you, “For the next 60 seconds, do not think about a white bear,” what is the only thing you will be able to think about? A white bear, of course.
The act of trying to suppress a thought or feeling paradoxically makes it stronger and more persistent. When you declare war on your anxiety, you are forced to constantly scan for it, monitor it, and focus on it, which only feeds it more of your precious energy and attention.
This is the internal war I describe in my book, The Observation Effect. The moment you say, “I need to get rid of this anxiety,” you create an illusion of two separate things: the “I” who is the fighter, and the “anxiety” which is the enemy. This internal division is the source of our suffering. Non-judgmental awareness is the secret to ending this war.
The Counterintuitive Solution: Awareness Without Judgment
Non-judgmental awareness is the practice of paying attention to your present-moment experience—including your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations—with a sense of open curiosity and without evaluation or judgment.
Instead of struggling against the quicksand, you are simply noticing what it feels like with a calm, scientific curiosity. “Ah, this feels like pressure around my legs. Interesting.” By doing this, you stop adding a second layer of suffering. There is the initial discomfort of the anxiety, but you are no longer adding the exhaustion of the struggle on top of it.
This practice dissolves the artificial separation between the “observer” and the “observed.” You are no longer a person fighting anxiety; you are simply the vast, open awareness in which the temporary sensations of anxiety are happening. This shift in perspective is the key to dissolving its power.
A 3-Step Practical Guide to Dissolving Anxiety
This is not a trick to make anxiety disappear forever. It is a practical method to change your relationship with it, allowing it to pass through you without pulling you under.
Step 1: Acknowledge and Label (The Welcoming)
The next time you feel the familiar stirrings of anxiety, your first move is not to resist, but to acknowledge. You must turn toward the feeling with a sense of gentle recognition. This is a core mindfulness practice of labeling.
Silently say to yourself:
- “This is anxiety.”
- “I am noticing the feeling of worry.”
- “Ah, the feeling of panic is here.”
This simple act of naming the experience does two powerful things. First, it gives you a small sliver of metacognition, reminding you that you are not the feeling itself, but the one who is aware of the feeling. Second, it shifts the energy from one of resistance to one of recognition, which is the first step toward acceptance.
Step 2: Investigate with Curiosity (The Body Scan)
Now, make a conscious effort to drop the story your mind is telling about the anxiety (“What if I fail?” “What if they judge me?”). The story is the fuel. Instead, bring your full, curious attention to the raw, physical sensations of the emotion in your body.
Gently scan your body and ask, with the neutral curiosity of a scientist:
- “Where is this feeling located? Is it a tightness in my chest? A knot in my stomach? A tingling in my hands?”
- “What is its texture? Is it sharp or dull? Hot or cold? Vibrating or solid?”
- “Is it staying the same, or is it changing moment to moment?”
By focusing on the direct, physical sensations, you anchor yourself in the present moment and stop feeding the catastrophic narratives of the past and future. You are taking the fuel away from the fire.
Step 3: Allow and Let Be (The Floating)
This is the final and most transformative step. Your task is to simply allow these physical sensations to be there, exactly as they are, without needing them to change or disappear. You are giving up the fight. You are leaning back into the quicksand.
Hold the sensations in your awareness with a sense of gentleness and compassion, as you would hold a frightened bird in your hands. Breathe with the sensations. Create space for them. Remind yourself that feelings are like weather patterns—they are temporary natural phenomena that arise, exist for a while, and inevitably pass away on their own when we don’t fuel them with our resistance.
When you stop fighting the anxiety and simply allow it to be, it loses its power over you. It may still be present, but you are no longer sinking. You are floating.
Peace is Not the Absence of Storms
The goal of this practice is not to create a life that is completely free from anxiety. For most of us, that is an unrealistic and unhelpful goal. The goal is to fundamentally change our relationship with our anxiety.
Peace is not the absence of storms, but the ability to remain a calm and steady anchor in the midst of them. Non-judgmental awareness is the skill that allows us to become that anchor. It is the realization that we are not the storm, but the vast, open sky in which the storm is passing.
This profound shift in perception is the ultimate expression of the ideas in my book, The Observation Effect. It is a complete guide to moving from a life of struggle against our own minds to one of compassionate and clear-sighted awareness.
