It’s Not the Chaos, It’s the Expectation: A Framework for Deconstructing Anxiety
Recently, I’ve spent time reflecting on the problem of anxiety. It’s something many of us deal with, often feeling like a vague, overwhelming fog.
But when I sat down to analyze my own experiences—trying to pinpoint exactly where that feeling comes from—I realized that anxiety isn’t usually random chaos. It’s almost always structural. It stems from specific flaws in the mental models I use to navigate the world.
If we can identify the roots of the anxiety, we can build a framework to handle it.
Through my reflection, I identified three main sources of anxiety, how they interconnect, and a two-step approach to regain our footing.
Part 1: The Diagnosis (Where Anxiety Comes From)
In my experience, anxiety isn’t usually caused by the event itself, but rather my relationship to the event. It almost always stems from one of these three situations:
1. The Expectation Gap (The Illusion of Control)
We often hear that anxiety comes from a “loss of control.” But that’s only half the story. Before you can lose control, there must be an expectation that you had it in the first place.
Anxiety thrives in the gap between our expectations and reality. Sometimes, we set the bar impossibly high, wanting control over things that are inherently uncontrollable. When we expect to be in the driver’s seat and reality suddenly grabs the wheel, panic sets in. The anxiety isn’t just about what is happening; it is the friction caused by our resistance to reality.
2. The Value Vacuum (Not Knowing What You Want)
If you don’t have a clear internal hierarchy of values—knowing exactly what you want and what is truly important to you—you become a reactive vessel for external pressures.
We live in an era of massive information flow and endless options. Without a strong internal compass, everything feels equally important. The urgent drowns out the important. This leads to chronic overwhelm as we try to juggle conflicting priorities that we didn’t even choose for ourselves.
3. The Social Mirror (External Validation)
This is perhaps the most paralyzing source: putting too much emphasis on other people’s views of us.
When we don’t know our own value (point #2), we outsource the measuring of it to society. We look into the “social mirror” to see if we are okay. The problem is that the mirror is constantly changing, and we have zero control over what others think. Basing your stability on something unstable is a recipe for constant anxiety.
Part 2: The Prescription (How to Handle It)
So, how do we break this cycle? The solution requires flipping our operating system. Instead of looking outward for cues, we must start inward.
Step 1: Define Your “Self” First (First Principles Thinking)
To handle anxiety, you must make your own self the priority. Before you look at the world, you have to look in the mirror and ask: What do I actually want? What is genuinely important to me?
This is difficult. We are conditioned by social norms and existing incentive systems. We often treat these systems (like career ladders or social expectations) as rigid boundaries.
But we must remember that these systems were designed by other people to put constraints on behavior. Don’t treat them as immutable laws of physics before you even know what you want.
The shift: Figure out what you value first. After you know what you want, then you can look at the societal constraints and decide consciously whether you want to work within them or break them. You become the actor, not the reactor.
Step 2: The Spheres of Control
Once you know what you want, the final step is calibrating your effort. While the Stoics famously spoke of the “dichotomy of control” (what is yours vs. what isn’t), I find it more useful to split control into three distinct rings.
Ring 1: Direct Control
This is your internal territory. It includes your actions, your effort, what you say, and how you allocate your time. This is the only place where you have total agency.
Ring 2: Influence
This is the gray area where most anxiety lives. It includes relationships, team decisions, negotiations, and probabilities. You can affect the outcome here, but you cannot dictate it.
Ring 3: No Control
This is the environment. It includes the macro economy, the weather, the past, and other people’s internal states.
How this fixes anxiety:
Anxiety is usually a result of trying to apply Ring 1 energy to a Ring 3 problem. To reduce it, you must map your worries to the correct ring:
In Ring 1: Act strongly. Focus on high-quality input and effort.
In Ring 2: Experiment and negotiate. Influence the odds, but detach from the guarantee.
In Ring 3: Practice acceptance. Observe it without trying to change it.
Moving Forward
Anxiety often feels like a defect, but I’m starting to view it as a signal.
It’s a signal that my expectations are out of alignment with reality, or that I’m trying to control the uncontrollable. By using this framework to diagnose the source and placing my efforts in the correct ring, the fog begins to lift.