Anxiety has become one of the most commonly reported experiences of modern life, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. People know they have it. Far fewer know what it actually is or where it comes from.
After many years working as a fear, phobia and anxiety specialist on Harley Street, I have found that certain approaches produce real change, and they tend to be the ones that work with the brain rather than against it. One of the most reliable of these is a technique called anchoring.
What anxiety actually is
Perhaps the most damaging belief people carry about anxiety is that it reveals something about their character. That if they were only braver, more resilient, more composed, it would not be happening to them.
This is not true. Anxiety is, far more often than not, a learned response. A conditioned reflex that the brain developed, usually without the person being aware of it at all. Trying to reason your way out of it tends not to work, because the emotional and rational systems of the brain do not communicate the way we might hope.
The foundation of this goes back to Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist working in the early 1900s. In his famous experiments, he would ring a bell just before feeding a dog. After enough repetitions, the dogs began to salivate at the bell alone. The food was gone, but the response remained. The brain had locked the two things together.
This kind of associative learning was later shown to operate in humans as well.
How the brain builds its associations
Phobias and anxiety are sometimes spoken of as the same thing, but the distinction matters. A phobia tends to be anchored to a single, identifiable event. A dog chase. A frightening flight. A moment of public humiliation in a classroom. One event, one fear response, one trigger.
Anxiety tends to be more diffuse. It often builds slowly, over months or years, from experiences that never add up to a single dramatic moment: an anxious home environment growing up, being moved around frequently, years of feeling unsettled or unsupported. Rather than the brain learning that one specific thing is dangerous, it begins to generalise. Anything uncertain, anything outside your usual range of comfort, anything slightly unpredictable, starts to carry a trace of that same unease.
The result is a person who often cannot point to what they are afraid of. The world just feels a little less safe than it should. A little more out of control. This can be more frustrating than a phobia precisely because the threat has no clear face.
The more encouraging part of this picture is that the same mechanism that creates negative conditioning can be used to create positive conditioning. You already know this from experience. A particular scent takes you back to a moment of complete safety. A piece of music returns you to a holiday, a relationship, a version of yourself that felt lighter and freer. The association was formed without your involvement. What anchoring does is form those associations deliberately.
A client who changed how she felt about turbulence
A few years ago, a client came to see me about general anxiety. Near the end of our session, she mentioned almost as an afterthought that she also had significant anxiety around flying. More specifically, around turbulence.
With very little time remaining, I decided to try anchoring. I asked her to step into the feeling fully: what was it like to think about turbulence? As she did that, I linked the emotional state to a light touch on one arm. Then I asked her to bring to mind a memory of feeling deeply connected and safe, somewhere she had felt genuinely loved and at ease. As she settled into that feeling, I linked it to a touch on the other arm. Then I brought both touches in together.
When two emotional states are fired simultaneously like this, the stronger one tends to dominate. It does not always produce an immediate transformation, but when the positive state has been built up with enough intensity, it can fundamentally alter the emotional charge that was attached to the original trigger.
Several months passed. Then she sent me a message from an airport. I assumed she was reaching out because she needed more help, and I was already thinking through what our next sessions might look like.
That was not what she was saying. She wrote to tell me that whenever she now thought about turbulence, she felt happy. Not merely neutral. Happy.
That is what conditioning in the right direction looks like.
How to try this yourself
The process is straightforward, though it requires genuine attention to make it work.
Begin by bringing to mind a time when you felt deeply relaxed. A beach, perhaps, or somewhere in nature, or simply that particular quality of calm just before sleep. Go fully into it. See what you saw. Hear what you heard. Let the physical sensation of it return to you and, as it reaches its peak, press your thumb and forefinger together and hold that pressure for as long as the feeling stays strong. The moment it starts to fade, release.
Then do it again with a different memory. This time, something connected to love or closeness. Looking at someone you care about. Watching a child play. Holding an animal. Whatever produces that particular warmth. Build it up as fully as you can, and at its peak, press your fingers together in exactly the same way, same pressure, same position.
You can repeat this with other emotions: a moment of helpless laughter, a time you felt genuinely confident, a moment when you felt completely safe. The more you layer in, the more robust the anchor becomes.
When you have worked through several memories, pause, clear your mind, and then press your fingers together. If the process has worked, you should feel a pull back towards those states, even without deliberately recalling them.
From that point on, use it early. The moment you notice anxiety beginning to rise, before it has gathered momentum, press your fingers together. Do not wait for it to build. The anchor is most effective against the first wave.
You can also strengthen it over time. Any moment in ordinary life when you feel genuinely calm, connected or confident, press your fingers together and fold that real experience into the anchor. Over time it becomes something you carry with you: a small, reliable route back to a steadier state.
The thing worth remembering
Anxiety is not a character flaw. It is a pattern the brain learned, usually in an attempt to protect you. That framing matters, because it means the pattern can be changed. The brain that learned one response is capable of learning another.
What techniques like anchoring offer is a way of working with that fact rather than fighting it. When people genuinely internalise that their emotional responses are not fixed features of who they are, something shifts. The situations that once felt unmanageable begin to feel, if not simple, at least navigable. And with that comes something worth having: the sense that you are not simply at the mercy of your own nervous system.
Christopher Paul Jones, a leading Harley Street phobia expert and author, developed The Integrated Change System to rapidly cure fears, anxiety, and phobias.