The Hidden Strengths Inside Anxiety, Panic, and Other Problems

Most people think that having anxiety, panic, or other unwanted patterns means they’re somehow weak, or that something is wrong with them.

If that feels familiar, it’s completely understandable. Far too often, the field of mental health treats unwanted thoughts, emotions, or behaviours as signs of illness, disorder, or something broken that needs fixing.

But what if that assumption itself is limiting?

What if unwanted patterns contain hidden strengths that, when utilised, could transform them… or make life better in other ways?

Milton Erickson was decades ahead of his time in recognising this.

A striking example comes from a 1968 recording. In it, Erickson works with a man who was suffering from severe phantom limb pain (the excruciating experience of pain in a limb that has been amputated).

By the time the man arrived at Erickson’s office, he had tried medication, meditation, stage hypnosis, and every psychological intervention he could find.

Nothing had helped.

Erickson recognised something no one else had:

The man’s ability to experience vivid, convincing sensations in a leg that no longer existed was a skill that could be utilised.

At one point, Erickson shared his observation explicitly:

“And if you can have phantom pain, you can have phantom pleasure.”

Across his career, Milton Erickson consistently demonstrated that problems contain real capacities, strengths, and skills that can become the very mechanism of change.

What others dismissed as pathology, deficit, or resistance, Erickson recognised as evidence of strength and opportunity.

And while the recording does not include long-term follow-up, one week after his first session the man can be heard saying:

“I have no pain whatsoever. And when I get up, I feel so much different.”

Erickson’s recognition of hidden strengths is central to my Automatic Change approach, whether I make it explicit or not.

Here are two examples that show this principle in action.

The first, with fear and anxiety (the work I’m best known for internationally).

The second, with compulsive gambling (because it demonstrates this principle with unusual clarity).

Case 1: Transforming Fear Into Laughter

Panic attacks (more accurately called false alarms) are evidence that your nervous system is capable of generating powerful, automatic emotional and physiological responses.

What if we could use this capacity in a useful way?

What if panic ‘attacks’ could be replaced with automatic surges of excitement, joy, or even laughter?

That might sound hard to believe, but it’s exactly what happened with Nathan.

Nathan experienced false alarms since childhood, particularly when flying. After our very first session together, he boarded his next flight and, as he later described it:

“I was laughing with my wife. We were laughing!”

So how is this possible, when fear is so often seen as something to be managed or coped with?

If a particular type of situation can automatically ‘trigger’¹ an unwanted response, we can often very quickly redirect the brain’s predictive processes so that, moving forward, it automatically triggers the desired response instead.

Just over two years after our session on flying, following many flights (including a return from a holiday in Hawaii), Nathan sent me this audio to share:

If the problem happens automatically, why shouldn’t the solution? 

This is what makes Automatic Change possible.

Our goal is simple: we want being at your best to be as effortless and automatic as the problem once was.

Case 2: Seeing A Gambling Problem As Misapplied Optimism

Years ago, I worked with a client whose gambling had begun to cause serious problems in her life.

Whenever she thought of or saw a slot machine, or drove past a casino, vivid images of ‘winning big’ would rush through her mind and excitement would surge through her body.

At the same time, the rest of her life felt ‘flat’ and ‘dull’, and her future seemed ‘bleak’.

The contrast made gambling feel even more irresistible as an escape.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman argued that optimism is a uniquely fortunate bias, suggesting that if you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.

And he was right—in the right context.

As Gregory Bateson pointed out:

“Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.”

And this is also true of thoughts, feelings, and other mental processes.

Optimism, like anything, can become a limitation in the wrong context.

I didn’t see my client’s problem as an “illness” or a “disorder”.

And I didn’t see her as broken.

What I saw was misapplied optimism.

She was extremely optimistic about her chances of winning at gambling, but she was not at all optimistic about her everyday life and her future.

Together we identified how she generated pessimism when thinking about her life and future, and how she generated optimism when thinking about gambling.

And then we swapped the contexts.

The result?

She became deeply pessimistic about her long-term chances of winning from gambling. Even the idea of gambling brought a sense of foreboding; an anticipation of loss, shame, and wasted money. Gambling had become ‘dull’, ‘flat’, and she perceived her chances of winning as ‘bleak’.

On the flip side, she became beautifully optimistic about her life and future. The excitement she’d been chasing through gambling was now redirected toward ‘big’, vivid, meaningful goals. And, given that she was a highly resourceful person, she naturally turned many of those goals into reality.

Following in Milton Erickson’s footsteps, none of this was done through logic, psycho-education, or conscious effort.

Instead, we did everything experientially, because, as Jonathan Haidt famously observed:

The Emotional Dog Wags The Rational Tail.

What Hidden Strengths Exist Inside Your Problems?

The field of mental health is organised around a central assumption: that unwanted thoughts, emotions, or behaviours are signs of illness, disorder, or something broken that needs fixing.

Milton Erickson worked from a more balanced, nuanced, and expansive view—one that allowed him to help people in remarkable ways that, decades later, still sit far beyond the limits of most mainstream approaches.

And so I wonder:

What hidden strengths might exist in the patterns you’ve come to think of as problems?

I think it’s a far more useful question than “What’s wrong with me?”

When those strengths are redirected, change often happens very quickly, and being the way you want to be becomes as effortless and automatic as the unwanted patterns used to be.

That is what Automatic Change makes possible.

Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious

1. For precision, I use the word “trigger” as a colloquial term. Emotions aren’t mechanically triggered by external events; they’re constructed, based on predictions the brain generates as result of past learning, context, current body signals, and other factors. ↩︎