When “I Feel Anxious” Becomes “I’m an Anxious Person”.

Recently, I heard someone who was about to give a video testimonial say something that immediately caught my attention.

“I’m an anxious person.”

She was clearly feeling anxious about being on camera, which is completely understandable. Most of us don’t spend our days having a lens pointed at our face while someone waits for us to say something intelligent.

But it was the language that interested me because there’s quite a difference between “I’m feeling anxious” and “I’m an anxious person.”

One describes how you’re feeling in a particular moment while the other starts to sound like who you are.

And we do this all the time.

I’m an overthinker. I’m a people pleaser. I’m terrible with money. I’m not confident. I’m a worrier.

We take something we feel, or something we have done repeatedly, and gradually promote it into an identity.

That matters because our beliefs influence what we pay attention to, what we remember and how we interpret what happens around us. Research into self-referencing also suggests that information connected to our sense of “me” receives particularly powerful processing in attention and memory. (PubMed Central (PMC)

If I simplify this into very normal human language… we’ve given our brain an instruction to follow.

Tell yourself, “I’m an anxious person” and your brain has a pretty useful brief.

It can remind you of the last time you felt nervous in a meeting. The presentation where your mind went blank. The conversation you replayed seventeen times afterwards. The moment you felt your heart racing for no apparent reason.

And there it is.

Evidence.

See? I told you I was an anxious person!

Meanwhile, all the occasions when you spoke confidently, handled uncertainty, made a decision without overthinking it or walked into a room perfectly comfortably don’t fit the story quite so neatly.

This feels particularly relevant at the moment because according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace data, 50% of Australian employees experienced stress for much of the previous day. (Gallup.com)

There is plenty going on in the world to create stress. Feeling anxious, overwhelmed or uncertain at times is part of being human.

The question I’m interested in is what happens when we start making those experiences mean something about who we are.

Because language gives us clues to the rules we may be living by.

Changing “I’m an anxious person” to “I’m feeling anxious about this” doesn’t magically make the feeling disappear but it does create some room around it.

Now we can become curious.

"What am I actually anxious about?”

“Am I worried I’ll look silly? Say the wrong thing? Be judged? Disappoint someone? Get it wrong?”

And perhaps the most useful question is, "Where did I learn that this was something I needed to worry about?”

That’s where things become interesting, because the label is no longer the end of the conversation, it becomes the beginning of one.

Once you start listening for identity language, you’ll hear it everywhere. In fact, you may be surprised by how often you hear it coming out of your own mouth!

And once you hear it, you get to decide whether that label is still useful.

Because if it’s costing you and you keep reinforcing it, there comes a point where if we’re not changing, we’re choosing.

So the next time you hear yourself say “I’m (an anxious person, an overthinker, a people-pleaser, not good with money… anything really)…”, listen carefully to what comes next.

Are you describing who you are?

Or has a feeling, habit or learned response simply been repeated for so long that it has started wearing your name badge?

If you’re curious about the patterns influencing the way you think, feel and behave, 5 Days to Clarity gives you a place to start noticing them. Over five days, I’ll help you notice what’s really driving your thoughts and reactions, so you can begin deciding what you want to keep, and what may be ready to change. Book a quick 10-min call here, to find out if this is the right step for you.