Why anxiety can be a source of creativity

I used to think of my anxiety as a cage I had to escape. Every panic attack, every sleepless night, felt like a personal failing—a sign that something was wrong with me. When your heart is hammering at 2 a.m. and your thoughts are sprinting down dark corridors, it’s hard to believe anything good could come from that feeling. For years, I did everything to conquer, avoid, or numb my anxiety. I devoured self-help books, practiced positive affirmations in the mirror, tried to “think” my way out of the dread. But the harder I fought it, the more tightly it seemed to grip me. I didn’t realize it then, but all my rational efforts were like trying to plaster over cracks in a dam without addressing the pressure building behind it. The anxiety kept flooding through.

My turning point began over a decade ago, when I met a man who would challenge everything I believed about my inner turmoil. Rudá Iandê— a Brazilian shaman and teacher—didn’t give me the usual pep talk about “conquering” fear. Instead, he asked me a simple, devastating question: “What if everything you think you are is just an illusion? What if all of your concepts about life are false?”​

I remember feeling almost offended. I had spent so long constructing a story about myself—who I was, what I should be—that the suggestion it was all a kind of dream felt absurd. Yet, I was intrigued. Anxiety had made me desperate enough to be open to anything, even the possibility that I had been looking at my life through a distorted lens.

Over many conversations (and the years of inner work that followed), I came to understand what he meant. I discovered that I had been living inside a narrative of my own making—a tightly scripted story informed by childhood memories, societal expectations, and my own fears. This was my belief system, an invisible architecture in my psyche that gave shape to “reality” as I knew it. In truth, my reality was largely a projection, much like a dream. I was, in Rudá’s words, “dreaming the world into being” through the power of my consciousness​, filtering the vast field of life’s possibilities through the narrow slit of my anxieties and assumptions. Modern physics even hints at this kind of participatory reality, where the act of observation influences the observed​. It’s as if life were a lucid dream and I had been sleepwalking, mistaking my own fears and stories for the world itself.

This realization hit me like a jolt. It wasn’t immediate “liberation”—if anything, it initially made me more anxious. If my sense of self was built on illusions, then what was real? It felt like standing on the edge of a great void, unsure if I would fall or fly. But this void, I learned, was exactly where new possibilities could emerge.

“Being unsure in your convictions is a good thing,” Rudá told me once. “Instead of wasting time trying to make sense of life, you can embrace it. Life is not safe. Life is wild! … We are as chaotic as life itself!​. In my case, that chaos was manifesting as anxiety. And rather than run from it, I began to consider: what if I could embrace the chaos?

Slowly, I shifted from viewing anxiety as a malfunction to seeing it as a message. This wasn’t a smooth or easy process. My psyche didn’t like giving up control. I was so used to analyzing and overthinking every emotion—that classic rational self-help approach—that truly feeling my feelings felt unnatural. But no matter how much I tried to intellectually master my fear, it never really went away. In fact, as I later read and Rudá had warned, simply slapping positive thinking on top of deep insecurities is like “stretching a rubber band”​—eventually it snaps back with all the tension you tried to ignore. And snap back it did, time and again, in waves of panic and self-doubt.

What changed was that I stopped running. With guidance, I dared to open that heavy door in my mind behind which I’d locked away all my “bad” feelings. I had always thought my anxiety was a monster lurking in the shadows of my subconscious. But when I finally faced it—when I swung open the cellar door and shone a light—I didn’t find a beast at all. I found a hurt, scared part of myself, like a trembling child, that had been isolated in the dark for far too long​. My heart softened. Instead of trying to banish this part of me, I comforted it. I said, “It’s OK. I’m here. Let’s explore this together.” And for the first time, my anxiety began to shift from a devouring beast into something more like a wounded ally.

It became clear that the very emotions I had labeled as “negative” or “forbidden”—my insecurity, fear, frustration and anger—were not aberrations to eliminate. They were energy. “Your forbidden emotions aren’t necessarily bad,” Rudá reminded me. “Insecurity, fear, frustration, and anger can be constructive powers if focused correctly.”​. This line echoed in my journals and in my mind. Constructive powers. Could my anxiety really be fuel for something constructive?

As I looked back on my life, I started to see a pattern that had been invisible to me before. Anxiety often visited me at the very moments I was on the cusp of growth. The night before I moved to a new city. The weeks after I left a secure but unfulfilling job to start my own venture. The moments before publishing an article or launching a project that was closer to my heart than anything I’d done before. In those times, anxiety would surge—yes, to protect me from potential failure or harm—but also to supply a certain adrenaline, a creative tension that pushed me to prepare, to imagine every outcome, to stay alert and think on my feet. It was a revelation to realize that what I’d thought was holding me back had often been secretly propelling me forward.

I began to see anxiety as a kind of internal compass. Its pangs and jitters were pointing me toward the very areas of life where I was stretching beyond my comfort zone—areas that mattered deeply to me. This new relationship with anxiety felt like learning to ride a wild horse instead of trying to slay it. I learned to hold the reins loosely, to respect its power without letting it run the show entirely. Sometimes I still got thrown off; I’m only human. But I would get back up, dust myself off, and listen to what the anxiety was trying to tell me.

What it often told me was: “There’s something important here. Pay attention.” In fact, anxiety and creativity started to seem like two sides of the same coin. The psychologist Rollo May had a term for this. He wrote that creating anything meaningful—truly bringing something new into the world—always involves tearing down some part of the status quo, and with that comes uncertainty and, inevitably, anxiety. “The more creative the person,” May observed, “the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.”​. I read that in a dog-eared copy of The Meaning of Anxiety and thought, Exactly. It’s not that creative people have to be anxious to create; it’s that those who create are willing to ride the currents of anxiety, to face the unknown. Kierkegaard, the philosopher who first called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom,” understood this dance with possibility and dread. And Nietzsche, ever the poet, put it even more sharply: “one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.”​ The chaos within me—which I had so long vilified as weakness—was in fact the very thing that birthed whatever stars I’ve managed to hang in my sky.

To be clear, I’m not romanticizing anxiety as some glamorous prerequisite for art. Anxiety in its extreme form can be debilitating, even life-threatening. There were days in my journey when I could barely get out of bed, when my mind was so clouded with worry that I couldn’t think straight. Creativity was the furthest thing from my mind during those dark spells. And psychological research does caution that being chronically overwhelmed or fearful tends to shut down the very openness that creativity requires​. It’s hard to be imaginative when you’re in fight-or-flight mode, when your body and brain are just trying to survive. I had to learn practices to calm my nervous system—breathing, grounding myself, sometimes simply crying or shaking out the tension—before I could alchemize that raw feeling into something useful. There’s a balance here. Too much anxiety, and you’re paralyzed; too little, and perhaps you’re complacent. But a healthy dose of existential angst? That, I’ve found, can light a fire under you like nothing else.

This is where Rudá Iandê’s teachings really guided me. “Our creativity and authenticity don’t come from the intellect,” he would say. “It comes from a much deeper place inside… a burning fire within.”​ I had been trying to solve my anxiety like a math equation, using logic to snuff out emotional flames. Rudá taught me to do the opposite: to step into the flame, to feel the heat, and to trust that my instinct—the ancient, earthy intelligence in my gut—knew what it was doing. He likes to point out that the human body, with all its trillions of cells in constant flux, operates with a wild, chaotic precision that our conscious minds can barely comprehend. Why, then, do we insist on trying to consciously control every aspect of our psyche? There is a deeper current that will carry us if we learn to ride it. In shamanic terms, that current is instinct. And instinct, I learned, has no interest in making me comfortable. Its job is to keep me alive and evolving. “Your instinct knows that anxiety is necessary to keep you alert and safe from potential threats,” Rudá explained, “and that a healthy dose of fear plays a key role in your self-preservation.”​ In other words, my anxiety was not a glitch in the system; it was the system, working as intended.

That understanding changed everything. It gave me permission to stop trying to eliminate my anxiety—and instead to work with it. I started treating my anxious energy as I would a strong river current: something I could either futilely swim against or learn to channel. When panic fluttered in my chest, I asked, What do you need me to see right now? Perhaps I’d been pushing myself too hard and needed to rest (creative rhythms have their ebbs and flows). Or perhaps I’d been playing it too safe and my angst was actually bottled-up inspiration, urging me to take a risk, to write that uncomfortably honest essay, to have that difficult conversation I’d been avoiding. Little by little, anxiety became less of a dreaded foe and more of a strange kind of companion—one that could still unsettle me, but also enlighten me if I was willing to listen.

And listen I did. In fact, my decision to co-create The Vessel platform with Rudá sprung directly from this new mindset. If you had told me ten years prior that I’d be working with a shaman to build personal development programs, I would have laughed (nervously, of course). Back then I was trying to escape anxiety, not dive into the very heart of it. But as I embraced these teachings—challenging my belief systems, befriending my fears, questioning the nature of reality, and trusting my instincts—I felt a profound shift. The energy that anxiety used to siphon away was now freed up and re-purposed. It became the fuel for my purpose. The restlessness, the disquiet that once kept me spinning in circles of worry, was transmuted into a drive to create something that might help others in the same way I’d been helped. In alchemical terms, I had turned lead into gold—transformed that heavy leaden anxiety into a creative gold.

I won’t pretend this was a solitary achievement or some neat, one-time transformation. It was, and remains, an ongoing practice, a continual alchemy of emotion into purpose. I had guidance at every step—especially from Rudá, whose Free Your Mind masterclass and teachings were a lifeline whenever I felt myself slipping back into old mental prisons. “Break through self-imposed limitations and let your true nature be,” he often urged​. That phrase became a mantra for me. Whenever anxiety flared up, I would ask: what self-imposed limitation is this revealing, and how can I move beyond it? Usually, the limitation was an outdated belief (“If I try this, I’ll fail and be ridiculed” or “I’m not capable of doing that”). By confronting those beliefs head-on—sometimes through writing, sometimes through deep conversations—I gradually loosened their grip. And as the old confines of my identity cracked, fresh creative insights began to pour in.

In building The Vessel, for example, I remember feeling terrified. Who was I to help curate a “space for self-discovery” for others? The night before we launched the platform, I barely slept. My mind was swarming with catastrophic scenarios. But instead of shrinking back, I channeled that nervous energy into triple-checking our content, into writing a heartfelt note to our first users about what this journey meant to me. The launch was a success—not because I had banished anxiety, but because I had harnessed it. I rode the wave instead of drowning in it.

Looking back now, I feel a kind of awe and gratitude for that entire journey. Anxiety was the shadow that dogged my steps for so long, but it also forced me onto a path I might never have found otherwise. In learning to face my inner chaos, I tapped into a wellspring of creativity and authenticity that I suspect we all possess, if we’re willing to go there. It’s ironic: I traveled the world (both outer and inner) searching for peace of mind, only to find that peace was not the absence of chaos at all. It was the embrace of chaos. True peace, I’ve come to see, is not a stagnant pond but a flowing river. It’s the confidence that I can navigate whatever rapids life throws at me, not by clinging to the shore, but by surfing the currents.

I write this in the hope that it sparks an ‘aha’ moment for you, as it did for me. Perhaps you’ve viewed your anxiety as a curse, an aberration to be medicated away or a personal failing to hide. I know that narrative intimately. But I invite you to entertain a different story: What if your anxiety is, in fact, a source of your creativity? What if it’s your soul’s way of knocking on the door, urging you to pay attention to the unrealized possibilities in your life? Imagine, for a moment, that the tightness in your chest or the restless energy in your limbs is not here to sabotage you but to catalyze you. This shift in perspective might not make the feeling any more pleasant in the moment—uncertainty will always be a bit uncomfortable to our human selves. But it can transform how much meaning and power you glean from it.

In my case, anxiety opened the door to meeting a teacher who changed my life, to unlearning a raft of false beliefs, and ultimately to embracing a calling that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It taught me that life is as dreamlike, malleable, and magical as we dare to imagine. It taught me that rationality has its limits—sometimes the answers we seek aren’t in the mind, but in the gut, in the heart, in that wordless place of intuition. And perhaps most importantly, it taught me that every emotion, even the dark and prickly ones, has its role in the grand alchemy of becoming who we’re meant to be.

So if you feel chaos inside you, know that you’re in good company. That chaos is not a mistake; it’s your creative engine. Yes, it’s terrifying at times—but as I’ve learned, terror and wonder often go hand in hand. Allow yourself to wonder at your fear. Listen to it. Learn from it. Dance with it. Over time, you may find, as I did, that the very thing you thought was holding you back is in fact the wind pushing you forward, into the uncharted waters where the truest, most dazzling stars of your life can be born.​