Why You Can't Fix Your Way Out of Worry
By Andy Petranek
The reflex to fix is running on the same alarm it’s trying to shut off.
Most of us were raised on one theory of change: effort. Try harder. Get more disciplined. Find a better strategy and execute it.
And look, I’m the last guy to knock effort. It’s how I got through Marine Corps officer training and led a platoon in Desert Storm. It’s how I grew CrossFit LA, one of the first CrossFit gyms in the world, from 8 members to more than 350. It’s how I built the Whole Life Challenge, an online health program that reached a quarter of a million people. Effort works on gyms, businesses, and pull-ups.
So naturally, when I turned my attention inward, I brought the same tool. The worry, the 3am spin, the low hum of anxiety that had been running so long it felt like personality. I figured I’d study it, understand it, and fix it. Apply effort until it broke.
Decades later, I understand my worry patterns better than almost anything else in my life. And understanding them has never once made them stop. If anything, the harder I pushed against them, the stronger they pushed back.
That confused me for years. Here’s what I think is going on.
When discomfort shows up, your nervous system reads it as a threat and reaches for relief and control. That reflex is protection, and it’s ancient. It kept you alive once. There’s no flaw in it.
But notice the timing. By the moment you’re asking “okay, what do I do about this feeling,” the alarm is already ringing. Your system is already activated. So every fix you generate in that moment is being manufactured by the alarmed system itself. The part of you trying to call it off as a false alarm is the same part that pulled the handle.
That’s the loop. The fix and the problem come from one source, so the fix keeps feeding the thing it’s trying to end.
Think of offense and defense in football. They look like opposites. Together they’re what keeps the game going. Fighting a pattern is just playing defense against it, and defense keeps it on the field.
Smaller example. Those red notification badges on your phone. Each one creates a tiny pulse of urgency, and clearing them gives you a tiny pulse of relief. But you’ve cleared thousands of them by now. Has the clearing ever produced peace? Or has it trained you to stay on alert for the next badge?
Here’s where this finally landed for me physically.
The cold plunge is part of my morning practice, and it took a couple of years of daily plunges to teach me this. When I started, 3 minutes in that water felt like an hour. So I did what an effort guy does: I fought it. Cranked music, played podcasts, distracted myself, gutted it out.
It sort of worked, in the way white-knuckling anything sort of works. But every plunge stayed a battle, because all that resistance was telling my body, over and over, that something dangerous was happening. The fight fed the panic.
Then I tried something else. I stopped opposing the cold and put everything on my breath. Slowed it way down, long easy exhales. These days I can take 4 breaths across 3 minutes and stay genuinely relaxed in there.
Same tub. Same temperature. Same 3 minutes. The only thing that changed was my relationship to the cold. When I quit fighting it, the water got easier to be in, and the water had done exactly nothing to earn that.
That’s what I mean by presence. Removing opposition. Welcoming what’s here and making some peace with it, even when it’s wildly uncomfortable.
And that’s where real change starts with the inner stuff too. You see the pattern clearly and honestly, and you let it be seen without reaching for the wrench. That sounds passive. It might be the hardest thing I practice.
Because when awareness shows up early enough, before the fix reflex fires, space appears. And in that space, for maybe the first time, you get a choice. You can respond instead of run the program.
I still worry. I’ll probably always be a guy who worries. But the worry gets a lot less room to run my life when I stop treating it as an enemy that needs defeating.
So I’ll leave you with the question that’s been sitting with me for a while now, the one I’d want sitting with you at 11pm.
What if the thing you’re fighting only exists because you’re fighting it?
With love, Andy