How to Break the Shame-Anxiety Cycle
Image Credit: Planet Volumes
If you live with anxiety, you might assume that that’s just “how I am” so much that anxiety is fused with your identity to the point you say “I’m an anxious person.”
You worry about what people think.
You replay conversations.
Your body jumps into fight-or-flight at the slightest hint of criticism.
But for many people I work with, anxiety isn’t just about “being an anxious person”.
Underneath all that worrying is something more insidious that doesn’t get any spotlight:
“I’m not enough / I’m too much”
That, right there, is shame. And when shame is pulling the strings, anxiety can often becomes its loyal and unwitting bodyguard.
In this blog I want to explore how shame can drive anxiety and how you can start breaking that loop from the inside out.
Existential Anxiety vs Shame-Driven Anxiety
Image Credit: Susan Wilkinson
From an existential perspective, a certain amount of anxiety is part of being human.
We’re aware that life is fragile.
We make choices without guarantees.
We care what happens to the people we love.
That kind of anxiety can be painful, but it can also be meaningful in the sense that it tells us to pay attention and to act with intention.
However, shame-driven anxiety is different.
Instead of, “This situation is uncertain,” the message turns into:
I am the problem.
If people really see who I am I will be rejected.
I must never mess up.
Anxiety then stops becoming a response to life’s real uncertainties, and then becomes a constant attempt to avoid exposure, judgement, or abandonment. It’s less about what might happen out there and more about what it would prove about me.
That’s when we get stuck in a shame–anxiety cycle.
A Story from KPop Demon Hunters
AI-generated image of KPop Demon Hunters, from left to right: Zoey, Rumi, Mira
I will say here that if you haven’t seen the movie KPop Demon Hunters then I advise you go watch it first and return here because there will be spoilers ahead. (I didn’t think I would be a fan because of the name of the movie but do go watch it. It’s gangsta). As of 15th November 2025 it is available on UK Netflix.
The focus of the story is on a KPop group called HUNTR/X (Huntrix), and in particular, the talented lead artist called Rumi, who has a secret: she is half-demon.
She has demonic markings, called patterns, on her body and her unusual powers make her stand out. In her world, different equals dangerous.
So what does she do?
She hides her patterns under clothes and make-up.
She works hard to appear “normal”.
She is totally vigilant on when and where her secret might potentially be exposed.
Underneath all of this is shame: “If they see what I really am, I’ll be rejected, or worse.”
Anxiety then becomes her body’s way of trying to protect her:
Scanning other people’s reactions.
She panics when her powers slip out of control.
Desperate attempts to cover up mistakes or strange incidents.
Of course, the more anxious she becomes, the more mistakes she makes… and the more convinced she is that she’s fundamentally wrong.
Rumi only begins to break it when she starts to accept that her “too much-ness” and her difference are also where her strength lives. When she is less at war with herself, her anxiety loses grip because there is less to hide.
And you don’t have to be half-demon for this to feel familiar.
What Shame Does in Your Nervous System
Image Credit: Markus Spiske
As well as shame taking the form of rather negative thoughts it can also be a full-body experience.
Many people describe:
A hot face or sudden rush of heat.
Tightness in the chest or stomach.
A strong urge to hide, shrink, or escape the room.
and much more…
Neuroscience research suggests that shame and related emotions activate brain networks involved in social threat and self-evaluation, including the midline prefrontal areas and the insula, which are linked to bodily awareness and pain (Takahashi et al., 2004).
Other studies find that people who are more prone to shame tend to have lower vagal tone (a measure of the calming branch of the nervous system), especially after experiencing relational trauma, suggesting that their bodies sit closer to a threat state baseline (Benau, 2018).
In Polyvagal terms, shame often acts like an accelerator pedal switch into:
Sympathetic arousal – fight/flight: racing heart, agitation, dread.
Or, for some, a shut-down response: numbness, collapse, total disconnect.
You might notice this if:
A mildly awkward interaction leaves you spiralling for hours.
A small mistake at work feels like a catastrophe.
Imagine being “found out” and your whole body tenses or freezes.
Your nervous system isn’t being dramatic, it’s responding as if your belonging is on the line. For social mammals like us, that can feel as serious as physical danger.
Signs That You’re Stuck in the Cycle
Perfectionism towards burnout
To protect against the feeling of being flawed you overprepare to try and achieve the impossible rather than go for “good enough.”
Replaying conversations like a broken record
You keep searching for the moment where you felt it all went wrong.
Avoiding opportunities you actually want
Your intuition or gut instinct that tells you what you actually want is being overridden by the risk of being seen that may feel unbearable.
Second-order shame about anxiety
You feel ashamed that your anxious responses have people question why you are acting that way, great, so now you feel anxious about your anxiety.
Living like you’re on trial
You have this feeling that even when you’re not being watched, you’ll be found out somehow.
If these make sense and you resonate with any of these it’s not that you’re broken or unfixable, it’s that your nervous system has learnt to adopt these strategies for survival, using anxiety as its go-to alarm system.
3 Ways to Interrupt the Cycle
These are small experiments that you can take to step in the direction of treating yourself less like a problem to hide and more like a person who is scared and deserves care.
Sometimes, the first step is the hardest because it goes against the shame messages that you deserve care, but if you’re reading this, you are inherently entitled to care for yourself.
The first two tips help for when you’re verging on the panicky side and the last one helps if you’re heading towards disconnection and numbness.
Name the two layers
Once your body gets going it’s easy to blend with the unhelpful story that you tell yourself. Try adding an observing voice “Right now I’m detecting a threat. This is anxiety. And underneath, there’s a fear that I’m not enough.”
This doesn’t deconstruct the shame messaging, but noticing it allows you to create a bit of space for it so you can have more freedom of choice in what you decide to do about it, and even if you eventually decide to submit to it, you’ve at least practised the art of noticing and distancing.
Use visual scanning to remind your body you’re here, not there
When shame activates, you focus on the imagined disaster. Your nervous system forgets that you’re actually just… sitting on your sofa.
A simple grounding practice that I use with lots of my clients: Slowly look around the room, name five things you can see in detail (colour, texture, shape), and let your eyes rest on anything that feels even slightly pleasant or neutral.
This kind of orienting is used in many trauma-informed approaches to help the nervous system recognise safety in the present moment and bring your prefrontal cortex back online. In other words, you’re showing your body that “Right now, in this room, I am not under attack.”
Try tiny somatic micro-movements to reclaim agency
Shame could also bring a sense of collapse, like your shoulders rolling forward, your gaze dropping, your body wants to disappear. Small, deliberate movements can send the opposite message.
You could experiment with:
Pressing your feet gently but firmly into the floor.
Rolling your shoulders back a fraction and letting your chest open a little.
Lightly pressing your palms together and noticing the strength in your arms.
You don’t have to exaggeratingly act it out. Even the smallest movement that says, “I’m still here, and I have some choice,” can slightly shift the state your nervous system is in.
How Therapy can Help you Untangle Shame-Driven Anxiety
AI-generated image of KPop Demon Hunters, from left to right: Zoey, Rumi, Mira
You don’t have to navigate this alone.
In therapy, we can:
Map your shame–anxiety cycle and work out what triggers it, what your body does, what your inner critic says.
Explore where those patterns began, often in relationships where you had to earn love, stay small, or hide parts of yourself.
Work with your nervous system and not against it and learn ways to notice early signs of threat and respond with self-kindness rather than self-punishment.
Practise safe, gradual vulnerability in the room, so that being seen doesn’t automatically equal danger.
As Brené Brown puts it, shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Anxiety becomes a kind of guard dog, constantly scanning for anything that might prove that belief true.
Therapy doesn’t try to put down the guard dog. Instead, we get curious about who taught it that the world, and you, were so unsafe.
Over time, as shame lessens, anxiety often doesn’t have to work quite so hard.
If you recognise yourself in this cycle and would like support in stepping out of it, you’re very welcome to reach out, whether you’re in Dorset for in-person sessions or elsewhere in the UK for online work.
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References
Benau, K. (2018). Pride in the psychotherapy of relational trauma: Conceptualization and treatment considerations. European Journal of Trauma and Dissociation.
Takahashi, H., Yahata, N., Koeda, M., Matsuda, T., Asai, K., & Okubo, Y. (2004). Brain activation associated with evaluative processes of guilt and embarrassment: an fMRI study. NeuroImage, 23, pp. 967-974.