#131 😰 Anxiety Is My Oldest Friend I Never Knew I Had

Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.

I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.

Part 10 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series

Belief: Anxiety is a flaw I’ll never escape.

Reality: It’s a built-in tool — one you have to learn to wield, not eliminate.

Action: Calibrate your anxiety to the problem in front of you, not the worst case in your head.

Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.

Every time my computer login fails, I wonder if I’ve been laid off.

The screen hangs for half a second, and my brain goes straight to the worst answer. Not a glitch. Not a bad password. Done. I take a short breath and try again, hoping the fear is just in my head.

It hasn’t happened to me before, but I’ve seen it enough to know the fear is real. I’ve had to make peace with that. Layoffs happen to good people doing good work. No amount of performing well fully insulates you.

So here’s what I tell myself to stay sane: I can’t control whether I keep my job. What I can control is showing up to learn until someone tells me to leave. That’s it.

This isn’t learned helplessness. It’s the opposite. Accepting what I can’t control freed me to act on what I can. I’ve taken the anxiety of being let go and turned it into a decision. Learn, keep showing up, be kind. That much I can control.

I learned to listen to my anxiety and be empowered by what it could teach me.

For most of my life, I assumed anxiety looked like paralysis — the person too scared to leave the house. That wasn’t me, so I assumed I wasn’t anxious.

I was wrong. I’ve been anxious since I was a child.

My anxiety looked different. I was imagining a hundred ways something could go wrong before I started. It was receiving feedback and immediately spiraling into what it might mean. It was working too hard out of fear of failure — or not starting at all for the same reason. I couldn’t begin something I couldn’t imagine finishing.

My extremes averaged out to look like normal human output (maybe?). So no one noticed. Neither did I.

Getting diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety helped me see it differently. The anxiety wasn’t new. It had always been with me. It was wired into how my brain processed uncertainty and perceived threat. And the environments I’d grown up in — ones that reinforced I wasn’t quite enough — had made it louder.

Anxiety isn’t the problem. The dial being stuck at maximum is the problem.

Clinically, anxiety is the body’s natural response to perceived threats — an alarm system that, in moderate doses, sharpens focus and drives preparation. It only becomes an issue when it stops being proportional and starts running everything.

Tech has a particular way of cranking that dial. The ambiguity is structural: you could produce something that checks every box and still have someone poke holes in it, because there’s no objective bar. Your performance is being evaluated against a target that moves. When that’s your environment every day, your nervous system doesn’t get to rest. Not because you’re broken — because the situation is genuinely uncertain.

For neurodivergent people, it’s compounded further. Michael describes it as nature plus nurture — a higher baseline predisposition for anxiety, amplified by years of environments that didn’t understand how your brain worked. The anxiety was already there. Tech just turns up the volume.

But anxiety isn’t only a liability. Rupert reframed it in a way that stuck with me: his anxiety makes him more thorough. It pushes him to look at angles he’d otherwise miss. The discomfort of possibly overlooking something drives him into the detail. That’s the gift version — the alarm calibrated to the actual risk, doing exactly what it should.

My working definition now: if my anxiety is louder than the demand in front of me, it’s no longer helping. Catastrophizing over a routine Slack message? The alarm has gone haywire. Double-checking work before a high-stakes presentation? That’s not paranoia, that’s preparedness.

You can’t eliminate anxiety. Michael is clear on this: “That uncomfortable feeling is never going to go away. What changes is how you approach it.”

The goal isn’t silence. It’s calibration.

Ask whether the volume matches the demand. Before you spiral, check: does the level of anxiety I’m feeling match what’s actually at stake? A login that fails doesn’t warrant the same response as a genuine performance conversation. Your brain will try to treat them the same. You don’t have to let it.

Develop your check-in system. For me, that’s asking a trusted colleague or my manager to reality-check my read on a situation. Not to be reassured — but to get a second set of eyes on whether the threat is as large as it feels. Anxiety distorts scale. Other people help restore it.

Accept what you can’t control, and get specific about what you can. In tech right now, job security is genuinely uncertain. Fighting that reality is exhausting and futile. What I can control: showing up, learning, doing work I’m proud of. I’m there until someone tells me I’m not. That’s enough to act on.

If it’s clinical, treat it clinically. There’s a difference between useful anxiety and anxiety that’s taken over. If checking the boxes doesn’t make the feeling go away — if the alarm stays on even when the evidence says you’re fine — that’s worth talking to someone about. Therapy and medication both have a role. You don’t have to will your way through it.

I used to think anxiety was a sign that something was wrong with me. Now I understand it was my brain doing exactly what it was built to do — just in environments that gave it too much to worry about.

Tech can be one of those environments. The ambiguity, the moving targets, the ever-present possibility of a layoff — none of that is in your head. It’s real. And your nervous system responding to it is not a weakness.

What I wish I’d known sooner is that anxiety was never my enemy. It was my oldest friend — one I just never had a name for. The question was never how to get rid of it. It was about finally understanding what it was trying to tell me.

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