If you’re wondering how to stop anxiety, here’s something you’ve probably not been told before.
It’s not a personality flaw. It’s not a chemical imbalance. It’s not even really about the thing you think it’s about – the relationship, the workload, the uncertainty about the future.
Anxiety is what happens when your internal world is at war with itself.
And the thing doing the fighting? Your values.
Your values are running the show
Every time you make a decision – even a tiny one, like whether to reply to that message or take a break you probably need – your subconscious runs it through a filter.
Does this align with what’s important to me?
That filter is your values system. Freedom. Safety. Responsibility. Honesty. Loyalty. Achievement. They’re all quietly in there, shaping every thought, every reaction, every moment of inexplicable dread when nothing is technically wrong.
Most people have never stopped to look at their values. Not really. They assume they know what they care about – and they’re not wrong, exactly. But what they don’t see is how often those values are fighting each other.
And that fight is what’s exhausting you.
What a value conflict actually looks like
Say you value freedom – the real kind, the ability to live on your own terms, make your own choices, not feel hemmed in.
And you also value responsibility. Showing up. Being dependable. Not letting people down.
Now try to make any decision where both of those are at stake.
You want a weekend away to reset – but leaving feels selfish. You want to change careers – but the financial risk feels irresponsible. You want to say no – but saying yes feels like the right thing to do.
Your subconscious is stuck in a no-win scenario. Whatever you choose, something important to you gets violated. And your nervous system, trying to protect you from making the wrong call, stays permanently on alert.
That alert state is anxiety.
It’s not random. It’s not irrational. It’s your system working exactly as designed – trying to navigate a conflict it doesn’t have the tools to resolve.
READ: Why Anxiety Doesn’t Go Away – What It Really Is and How It Resolves
The Juggler
Think about juggling three or four balls. Manageable. You find a rhythm.
Now imagine someone keeps throwing more balls in. Five. Ten. Twenty. Fifty.
At some point you don’t drop a few – you freeze completely. Your arms lock up. You can’t track them all. You shut down.
That’s what your subconscious is doing with your values. Not three or four – dozens of them, all loaded with distortions and conflicts, all demanding attention every time you try to think a thought or make a move.
No wonder you’re exhausted. No wonder decisions feel impossible. No wonder you lie awake at 2am running the same loop.
You’re not weak. You’re juggling fifty balls and nobody told you that was the problem.
It gets messier than that
Here’s the part that usually surprises people.
It’s not just that your values conflict with each other. Each value is also distorted on its own – twisted by fear, past experience, or the conclusions your younger self drew about what was safe.
Take freedom. You say you value it. But if freedom has been coded as dangerous – because being too much got you rejected, or independence meant being alone – then your subconscious puts a ceiling on how much of it you’ll actually allow yourself.
You want freedom and you’re terrified of it. Simultaneously. In the same body.
Or responsibility. You pride yourself on being reliable – but maybe reliability has tipped into over-functioning. Taking on what isn’t yours. Feeling resentful and never saying so. Avoiding the areas where responsibility feels too exposing.
The value isn’t clean. It’s contradictory. And that internal contradiction creates friction that your nervous system experiences as anxiety every single day.
Heather’s story
Heather is a CBT therapist. She knows anxiety inside out – professionally, academically, technically. She’s trained in all the tools. She uses them with clients.
And she couldn’t shift her own fear of pregnancy and childbirth.
Her tokophobia (reproductive anxiety disorder) was so entrenched that she genuinely wasn’t sure she could ever have children. The very thing she wanted was the thing her nervous system was treating as a threat. Classic value conflict – the desire for family colliding with fear coded as survival.
After working with Head Trash Clearance, she cleared the distorted values driving the fear. Safety. Control. Vulnerability. What her body was telling her was dangerous about the thing she wanted most.
She got pregnant. Had her first child. Is now expecting her second.
She uses HTC with her own clients now – because she knows what it feels like when the standard tools don’t touch the root. And she knows what it feels like when something finally does.
So, how to stop anxiety?
If anxiety is driven by value conflict, managing the symptoms will only take you so far.
Breathing techniques settle the nervous system in the moment – but the conflict is still there. CBT helps you reframe the thoughts – but the charge underneath them isn’t a thought, it’s a pattern wired into your emotional operating system. Journalling helps you understand what’s happening – but understanding doesn’t clear the charge.
What clears it is going into the values themselves. Finding the distortions. Clearing the conflict. Taking the balls out of the air one by one until the juggling act becomes manageable – and eventually, unnecessary.
That’s what Head Trash Clearance does. Not around the anxiety. Not despite it. Through it, at the root.
Where to start
If this is landing – if something in here has pinged – the first step is figuring out exactly what’s driving your anxiety. Not in general terms, but specifically: which values are in conflict, where the charge is highest, what your system is actually running on.
The free Anxiety Assessment does that in a few minutes. It’s not a quiz. It’s a proper diagnostic that tells you your top anxiety drivers and where to focus first.
→ Take the free Anxiety Assessment.
If you already have a sense that value conflicts are behind your anxiety and you want to know how to stop anxiety and have a structured path through clearing your value conflicts, the Anxiety Healing System is the place to go. It covers the six core anxiety drivers – including value conflicts – with proper healing resources, not just information.
→ Anxiety Healing System.
Anxiety doesn’t have to be the thing you manage forever. It’s a signal. And once you know what it’s pointing to, you can actually clear it.
Head Trash Clearance is not therapy and is not a replacement for clinical mental health support. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a qualified professional.
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