Anxiety is usually treated as a disease to be eliminated. Medication and psychotherapy have their place, but what if, in our pursuit of so-called mental health, we are lobotomizing something essential to being human?

In this Exploring the Psyche conversation, Andrew is joined again by licensed therapists Tyler Finders and Jeremy Kee to ask what anxiety actually is. We argue that anxiety is not an impediment to agency, but a call of the human spirit to take responsibility for our choices in the moment where what has been meets what might still be.

We talk about surface-level anxiety versus deeper existential anxiety, courage as every virtue at its testing point, spheres of control versus spheres of concern, and why anxiety cannot (and need not) be “cured.” It can only be answered: by reclaiming agency instead of surrendering it.

If anxiety is how freedom feels, the question is not how to make it disappear, but how to let it educate us into responsibility.