The Jewish Answer to Anxiety: Give Up Control

For more than 20 years, I have studied and treated anxiety.

I work at one of the world’s leading psychiatric hospitals, I’m an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and I founded Center for Anxiety where over 10,000 people have received care. More recently, I built a free app that helps people work through anxiety in four simple steps (more on that below).

I’ve learned about anxiety from extraordinary clinicians, researchers, and patients. But over time, I’ve come to realize that some of the deepest lessons I’ve learned about anxiety were embedded in Judaism.

Anxiety Isn't Your Enemy

This became clear to me in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when I faced my own anxiety. Like everyone, I worried about my family's health. But what scared me most was the mental health fallout I saw coming.

At the time, Center for Anxiety had about 500 active patients, and the world shut down overnight. We moved our entire practice to telehealth in two weeks flat. I was sure our patients, already struggling with high anxiety, would crack under the isolation, uncertainty, and disruption. I braced for a spike in suicidality, substance use, and marriages falling apart.

Then we looked at our data, and the opposite happened. Patients who'd started treatment before March 2020 didn't worsen at any point that year. They actually did better than people who'd never dealt with serious anxiety before.

Why?

Because they'd already named their fears, said them out loud to someone, started facing their demons, and learned how to function in an uncertain world.

That flipped everything I thought I knew about anxiety. I'd been trained to treat it as a symptom to reduce, a problem to manage, a disorder to fix.

When anxiety becomes disabling, that's true. But most anxiety isn't a disease. It's just an emotion. And emotions aren't always meant to be eliminated. They can show us what matters, deepen our connections, and be a catalyst for growth.

What the Torah Understands about Anxiety

Judaism maintains that fear, grief, distress, and uncertainty are not signs that a person is defective. They are part of being human.

Judaism maintains that fear, grief, distress, and uncertainty are not signs that a person is defective. They are part of being human.

In fact, they are part of spiritual depth. If emotional struggle itself were a defect, some of Judaism’s greatest figures would have been disqualified. None of them were emotionally flat.

King David wrote about being so overwhelmed by fear and anguish that his whole being was stricken with terror. In Psalm 6, he describes weeping each night until his bed was drenched with tears.

After years of infertility and humiliation, Channah became so distressed that she stopped eating and wept openly. When she stood before God in prayer, she poured out her heart with such intensity that Eli the High Priest thought she was drunk (Samuel I, Chapter 1).

Similarly, at one point in his life, Elijah was so exhausted and afraid that he fled into the wilderness, sat beneath a tree, and prayed that he might die (Kings I, Chapter 19).

The message is clear: it is a mistake to expect a life without fear, struggle, or uncertainty. Distressing emotions do not define us. They are simply part of the human experience.

In fact, anxiety is often a good sign. We worry about our children because we care about them. We care about our health because we want to live. We get nervous about our livelihoods, families, and Israel, because those are things that matter to people who have good values.

A Torah approach to anxiety, therefore, is not simply: How can I get rid of these feelings? The starting point is: What is my anxiety about? And, how can I use it constructively?

Of course, this does not minimize anxiety disorders, which can be severe and disabling. Clinical anxiety warrants professional treatment; I have spent much of my career doing precisely that work. But don’t assume that every pang of anxiety is pathological. Mental health does not mean feeling calm, happy or certain all the time.

Give Up Control

If anxiety is not always the problem, what is? Usually, it’s our response to anxiety, especially our demand for control.

We live in a world that constantly promises certainty. We can track our family members, bank accounts, sleep, heart rate, and even the exact location of a food order.

You’d think all that certainty would decrease anxiety? But low-income countries have a fraction of the anxiety compared to high-income nations. The more control we perceive, the more we expect it, and the more anxious we become.

Judaism places firm responsibility on human beings to do our best, but zero for controlling the outcome of what happens.

Judaism offers a different framework. It places firm responsibility on human beings to do our best, but zero for controlling the outcome of what happens.

When we’re sick, we are commanded to go to doctors. When we’re in need of funds, we are required to work. When our children need help, it’s a mitzvah to assist. When we do something wrong to someone, we must apologize. We work hard, pray, and do our part. But the outcomes of all those efforts are squarely in God’s hands.

Anxiety intensifies when we viscerally confront situations that remind us of how little control we actually have over the world. I now teach my patients and students to lean into those feelings, to accept that we are not in control.

This idea is what led me to build the Four Steps App (I made it free because I believe in this message and mission). Our devices train us constantly to seek more control: Check, refresh, track, search, share. The solution is to use the same device to teach the opposite.

The app will not make you less anxious. It will take you through Four Steps, the last of which is Let Go. At that point, anxiety becomes a catalyst for spiritual growth, to release what’s not yours to control.

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, this is the work before us. We pray for a good, sweet year filled with health, connection, success, and peace. We do everything in our power to pursue those blessings.

And we will declare that the world is ultimately not ours to control because God is King. That proclamation is so fundamental that we don’t just say it - we sound it. The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16a) connects the shofar directly with proclaiming God’s kingship. Its piercing cry gives voice to something almost beyond words: we are not in control. God is.

We do not know what the year ahead will bring. But we can enter it with courage, meaning, and faith by doing our part and releasing the rest. That is Judaism’s answer to anxiety: not gaining more control, but affirming that we never had it in the first place.