The Anxiety Loop: Why the Things That Calm You Down Can Keep You Stuck

Why does the anxiety keep coming back, even after you've checked, Googled, asked for reassurance, or prepared for every possible outcome? This week on Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, continues the October anxiety series by breaking down the anxiety loop: a cycle she sees constantly in her therapy practice.

Using everyday examples like an unanswered text, a strange body sensation, and the urge to triple-check an email, Jessica explains how anxiety moves from trigger to prediction to discomfort to...

Your Anxiety Is Trying to Protect You

Healing Is My Hobby | October 12, 2026

Last week we asked, is this a problem, or is this a prediction? This week we go deeper into why anxiety shows up the way it does. Underneath the overthinking, checking, avoiding, rehearsing, and 3 a.m. wake-up calls, anxiety usually has one message: something might go wrong, and I want to make sure you're prepared.

In this episode, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, explains how your brain's alarm system works, why it can become oversensitive, and why anxiety can be protective without being...

When Stress Becomes Anxiety: Is It a Problem or a Prediction?

All through September, we talked about your nervous system: stress signals, regulation, and the idea that calm isn't the only healthy state. This month, we're taking that conversation one step further into anxiety.

Anxiety doesn't always look like a panic attack. Sometimes it looks like overthinking, irritability, procrastinating, or being incredibly productive. Sometimes it's asking "are you sure you're not mad at me?" for the third time, Googling the same question for the fifth time, or lying awake at 2 a.m. holding a very...

Not Everything That Feels Urgent Is Urgent: Telling the Difference Between Real Urgency and Anxiety

An uncomfortable email arrives and you feel like you have to answer right now. A text goes unanswered and you need to know why. You remember a small task and it has to be done before you can sit down. Urgency can feel like important information, but sometimes it's anxiety in a very convincing disguise.

In this final episode of our September series on our relationship with doing, I bring the month together by looking at what sits underneath so...

Somewhere along the way, calm became the gold standard for mental health. But what if we've been measuring regulation by the wrong thing? In this episode, Jessica explains why nervous system regulation isn't about staying calm. It's about recognizing what's happening inside you, understanding what you need, and responding without treating every uncomfortable feeling like an emergency. You'll learn how to catch your earliest signals, why relief and regulation aren't always the same thing, and how to build a regulation menu that fits you.

In this episode

Why do so many of us treat rest like a reward instead of a basic need? In this episode, Jessica unpacks the hidden rule a lot of high achievers live by: I can rest once everything is done. The problem is, the finish line keeps moving — there's always one more email, one more task, one more thing to get ahead on. Jessica explores where this belief comes from, why it hits especially hard for people who are "good at" being productive, and what it actually takes to start relating to rest as a resource instead of a prize.

You finally sit down to rest… and your brain starts running through your to-do list. Sound familiar? In this episode, Jessica breaks down why stopping and regulating are not the same thing — and why your body can stop moving long before your nervous system actually settles.

What We Cover

What happens when you finally have nothing to do?

For some of us, the answer isn't relief. It's discomfort.

In the Season 2 premiere of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica explores what happens when productivity becomes more than a habit and starts functioning as a way to manage anxiety, uncertainty, and nervous system activation.

In this episode, you'll explore:

This week, Jessica closes out the summer Healing Moments series with an invitation: what if you let yourself be uncomfortable — on purpose?

Not unsafe. Not overwhelmed. Just uncomfortable. For anyone who identifies as an overachiever, a fixer, or a chronic doer, stillness itself can feel unbearable — and productivity often becomes a quiet way of avoiding harder feelings like uncertainty, boredom, or loneliness.

This week's practice: Find 5–10 minutes and intentionally don't fill them. No phone, no podcast, no folding laundry, no to-do list. Just sit — with your coffee, on the porch, wherever. Notice what comes up: the urge...

This is the last journal prompt of the summer — and next week's Healing Moment is the final one before Season 2 launches. So this week's prompt is about making space for what's next by naming what you're ready to release.

Today's prompt: What do I want to leave behind before September?

Some ways to go deeper:

So many of us are waiting for the moment we finally "arrive." When we lose the weight. When the kids need us less. When work calms down. When we're more organized, more confident, more together... then we'll be happy. Then we'll rest.

But what if there isn't an arrival point? In this trailer, Jessica and Kelly open up Season 6 with a question that changes everything: what if this is it? Not in a depressing way, but in a freeing one. Maybe your life isn't something you have to perfect before you're allowed to enjoy it. Maybe you...

As summer winds down and the back-to-school transition sets in, that low hum of anticipation and dread can make it hard to stay present. In this Healing Moment, Jessica walks you through the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, one of the most effective tools for anxiety, dissociation, and overwhelm. Using your five senses, this practice pulls you out of the future-focused spiral of anxiety and back into your body, back into the only moment you're actually in.

Jessica also shares a preview of her upcoming course, Why You Can't Stop, launching this September, including the concept...

This week's Healing Moment is an action step Jessica uses regularly in her clinical work: writing an unsent letter. It's a simple, powerful practice for releasing what you've been holding onto — honestly, and without ever having to send it.

What You'll Learn

An unsent letter is written with full honesty, knowing it will never reach its recipient. It's not about the person on the other end — it's about you, and what needs somewhere to go. Jessica offers a few starting points for who or what you might write to:

It's the first Monday of August, and Jessica invites listeners to pause and take stock — not of who they want to be, but of who they've actually been this summer. In this week's Healing Moment, she offers a gentle, guided journal prompt designed to help you see yourself clearly, honestly, and without judgment.

What You'll Reflect On

This episode is a journaling exercise built around one core question: "Who have I been this summer?" Jessica walks through a series of follow-up prompts to help you go deeper:

Summer is beautiful, but summer can also be a lot — family in town, packed schedules, travel logistics, heat, and the slow creep toward the end of the season. In this Healing Moments episode, Jessica closes out July with a simple, clinical, and highly effective nervous system tool: box breathing.

Also known as square breathing, this technique is used by athletes, surgeons, and Navy SEALs to stay regulated under pressure — and Jessica leans on it herself, often right in her car between one thing and the next. It's four equal sides of a breath: inhale, hold, exhale, hold, each...

Three weeks into the summer series, Jessica shifts from reflection to action. Wellness culture hands us an endless to-do list, meditate, journal, hydrate, ground, breathe, and when the list is endless, we end up doing none of it. This week's Healing Moment is about choosing just one anchor practice to carry you through the rest of the summer.

What You'll Learn

This week's Healing Moment isn't a breathing technique, it's a question. Jessica invites you to slow down and sit with a journal prompt designed to uncover what rest truly means to you, beyond the wellness buzzwords. Because before you can prioritize rest, you have to actually know what it looks and feels like for you personally.

What You'll Learn

This summer's Healing Moments series kicks off with one of Jessica's favorite go-to tools: the 4-7-8 breath. In under three minutes, this simple breathing technique can shift your nervous system out of stress mode and into rest and restore. Jessica walks you through it step-by-step, so you can practice it right along with her and start using it anywhere you need a reset.

What You'll Learn

It's the Season One finale of Healing Is My Hobby! Jessica takes you on a month-by-month journey through everything we explored together this year — from grounding in October to identity in June. She revisits the biggest reframes, the healing lab experiments, and the tools that mattered most, then sends you into summer with five practical ways to carry your healing forward. Plus, a first look at what's coming next: weekly summer micro-episodes starting July 7th, and a Season Two reveal in September.

In This Episode:

Are the stories you tell about yourself actually true — or are they ones you inherited, adapted, or took on to survive? This month's Healing Lab experiment is deceptively simple: spend seven days noticing every fixed label you use to describe yourself, and ask one question — is this true, or is this adapted?

In this episode, Jessica walks you through the clinical framework behind this experiment (narrative therapy and the research of psychologist Dan McAdams), explains how repeated self-stories literally become the self we inhabit, and guides you through a small but powerful practice: catching the story, holding it u...

You've been going through your life and somewhere along the way, you stopped recognizing yourself. Maybe you feel like you're watching from the outside. Maybe you wake up and wonder if this is actually your life. If that resonates, this episode is for you.

In this final episode of June's Identity series, Jessica puts a clinical name to an experience so many people are quietly living: identity disruption. She breaks down what's actually happening in the brain and nervous system when trauma, chronic stress, or major life transitions crack your sense of self open, and she makes...

A guided identity workout to help you sort the roles you've chosen from the ones you've just been carrying.

Episode Overview

This episode is part of the June identity series and follows Episode 1's exploration of where identity comes from. In this Therapy Is My Cardio segment, Jessica guides listeners through a structured, journal-based workout to surface their roles — and honestly assess which ones were chosen, which were inherited, and which were born out of survival.

Just like a real workout, this episode has a warm-up, a hard middle, and a cool-down. Listeners ar...

Have you ever done the work — named the trauma, grieved the losses, started releasing the shame — and then looked up and thought… who am I? That disorientation isn't a problem. It's actually the beginning of something important.

In this episode, Jessica opens the June identity theme by introducing one of the most foundational questions in healing: where did your sense of self actually come from? Drawing on attachment theory and her clinical experience, she walks through the difference between your core self — the parts of you that were always there — and your adapted self — the version of you that lea...

We close out May with the deepest layer of shame work yet. In this final episode of our shame and self-worth series, Jessica reframes shame not as a character flaw or a belief system — but as a trauma response. One that lives in the body, wires itself into the nervous system, and follows us long past the environments that first created it.

This episode unpacks the neurobiology of shame, the connection between early attachment wounds and the shame we carry into adulthood, and what it actually looks like to begin healing at the level where the wound li...

Welcome to the Healing Lab — the episode where we stop talking about the work and actually start doing it. This month’s theme is shame and self-worth, and these experiments are rooted in something deeply personal: the belief that you cannot think your way into self-worth. You have to practice it.

In this episode, Jessica shares two somatic and behavioral experiments designed to interrupt the pattern of conditional worth — and invites you into the lab alongside her.

What We Cover

This is the Therapy Is My Cardio episode for May — which means we're not just talking about emotional shame today, we're doing the reps. If last week's episode gave you the clinical foundation (what shame is, where it comes from, and how it hides), this episode is where you put that understanding to work. Jessica walks you through the specific kind of shame that wraps itself around your feelings — the inner voice that calls you too much, too dramatic, too sensitive, or simply not allowed to feel what you feel. It's one of the quietest forms of self-abandonment there is...

May Shame & Self-Worth Series, Episode 1

Shame is one of the most common — and most misunderstood — experiences in the healing journey. It's not embarrassment. It's not guilt. It's the quiet, persistent belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you. In this first episode of our May series on shame and self-worth, Jessica lays the clinical foundation: what shame actually is, where it comes from, and why understanding it is the first step toward being free of it.

What We Cover

Shame vs. guilt — they feel similar, but they operate very differently and lead to very d...

We're three weeks into grief month, and this episode goes somewhere that doesn't get nearly enough airtime — grieving someone who is still alive. Whether you've had to create distance from a relationship for your own well-being, or you're mourning a version of a person who is no longer who they once were, this kind of loss is real, disorienting, and deserves to be named.

In this Therapy Is My Cardio segment, Jessica walks through the clinical framework of ambiguous loss and four powerful shifts that actually move the needle — straight from the therapy room.

What You...

In this final episode of the April grief series, Jessica explores identity grief — the grief that comes not from death, but from losing a version of yourself. Whether it's a milestone birthday, a career shift, a diagnosis, or a life that looks nothing like the one you imagined, identity grief is real, clinically significant, and rarely given the space it deserves.

Jessica shares a deeply personal reflection on turning 47 and the quiet spiral that followed — and then walks listeners through the Three Layer Model she uses in clinical practice to help clients process identity grief. This is a He...

Episode Summary

In this week's This Might Be a Trauma Response segment, Jessica takes the conversation about grief a layer deeper — moving beyond last week's broad definition of loss into a specific and often invisible form of pain: disenfranchised grief. This is the grief that never got witnessed. The loss that was minimized, dismissed, or met with an "at least" instead of acknowledgment. Jessica explores what happens psychologically when grief goes unvalidated, names the symptoms it can create, and offers a path forward through self-witnessing.

What's Covered in This Episode

In this month's opening episode, Jessica introduces April's theme: grief — and challenges the widely-held belief that grief only belongs to death. Drawing on clinical definitions and her own therapeutic lens, she explores how grief shows up across a wide range of losses, why unacknowledged grief doesn't disappear, and what it means to finally name what you're carrying. She also introduces the concept of disenfranchised grief and invites listeners into a simple but powerful reflective practice to close out the episode.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

This Might Be a Trauma Response: High-Functioning Trauma

Healing Is My Hobby | This Might Be a Trauma Response Series

What if the most common sign of trauma isn't falling apart — it's having it all together?

In this installment of the This Might Be a Trauma Response series, Jessica breaks down high-functioning trauma: what it is, why it's so easy to miss, and the four ways it most commonly shows up in everyday life. This episode is for the person who keeps going, keeps producing, keeps holding it together — and quietly wonders why something stil...

Your nervous system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

But when the danger has passed and the responses stay — the numbness, the sleeplessness, the reactions that feel way too big for the moment — that's when it becomes important to understand what's actually happening inside you.

In this Healing Lab episode, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, takes you deep into the world of Big T and Little t trauma — what they are, how they live in your body, and most importantly, two simple experiments you can start today to begin reconnecting with yourself.

T...

What if your triggers weren't signs of weakness, but proof your nervous system is working exactly as designed?

In this Therapy Is My Cardio workout, Jessica walks you through a four-step real-time regulation practice for mild, everyday triggers: the critical email, the tense conversation, the racing heart in traffic. You'll learn to identify what's activating you, notice where it lives in your body, and choose a grounding intervention — whether that's breathwork, orienting, or gentle movement. Think of it as a small but mighty nervous system workout. Because healing doesn't happen in one big moment. It happens in hu...

What if trauma isn’t defined by the event — but by how your nervous system experienced it?

In this episode of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, breaks down one of the most misunderstood topics in mental health: trauma.

Many people believe trauma only applies to extreme, life-threatening events. But trauma is actually about nervous system overwhelm — when experiences exceed our capacity to process them in the moment.

Jessica explains the difference between Big T trauma (major life-threatening events) and little t trauma (chronic emotional stress, relational wounds, and repeated experiences of not fe...

What if your overwhelm isn’t weakness… but your nervous system trying to protect you?

In a world that feels loud, fast, and often unsettling, it’s easy to assume something is “wrong” with us when we feel numb, reactive, exhausted, or on edge.

In this episode of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, invites you to consider a gentler truth: many of your reactions to current world events aren’t character flaws — they’re trauma responses.

With over 19 years as a therapist specializing in anxiety and trauma, Jessica breaks down what nervous system o...

What if staying informed is actually dysregulating you?

And what if protecting your peace isn’t avoidance… but wisdom?

In this month’s Healing Lab, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, tests real-life nervous system practices to answer one question:

What actually helps us stay regulated in a dysregulated world?

Not perfectly. Not as a productivity hack.

But as an experiment.

This month’s lab included:

Is Doom Scrolling a Bad Habit… or Your Nervous System Asking for Help?

In this episode of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco takes a compassionate look at doom scrolling—not as a lack of discipline or willpower, but as a nervous system response to uncertainty, fear, and information overload.

We’re living in a time of nonstop headlines, constant alerts, and a lingering sense of urgency. When the world feels unpredictable, our brains naturally search for information as a way to regain control. Jessica breaks down what’s really happening in the brain and body dur...

What happens when the world feels overwhelming—and your nervous system won’t settle?

In this episode of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco explores what it really means to stay regulated in a dysregulated world. Through personal reflection and therapist-informed insight, Jessica shares how our nervous systems respond to stress, uncertainty, and perceived threat—even when danger is indirect.

Using a recent personal experience as a touchpoint, this episode gently unpacks the difference between survival mode and intentional regulation, reminding listeners that frustration and gratitude can coexist. You’ll learn why feeling overwhelmed makes sense, h...

Chasing Brighter Season 5 Trailer: Reset, Rest, Reconnect

What if every season of life deserves to feel brighter?

Chasing Brighter began as a guide for women in midlife—but this season, we’re expanding the conversation. Because no matter your age, your season, or your story, you deserve joy, growth, and connection.

In Season Five, Jessica and Kelly invite you into a deeper, more honest space—one that celebrates realness over perfection and growth over pressure. This season is about connection, authenticity, and permission to be exactly who you are.

✨ Real is the new...