What Happened When I Let Myself Unravel

For most of my teen and adult life, my primary coping strategy was this: hold it together.

No matter what was happening inside—racing thoughts, tight chest, sleepless nights, a low-grade despair humming in the background—I believed my job was to manage it quietly and keep moving. Be functional, reliable, productive and calm enough on the outside that no one would ask uncomfortable questions.

I got very good at this. Too good.

From the outside, my life looked steady. At most stages of my life I had a decent job, good friends, a loving family and a meditation and yoga practice. I didn’t look unhealthy . And yet, inside, anxiety and depression were slowly eating away at me – not in dramatic, catastrophic ways, but in subtle ones. The kind that shrink your life inch by inch while you convince yourself you’re “fine.”

Eventually, something in me knew the truth: what I was calling stability was actually rigidity. What I was calling strength was causing exhaustion. And what I was calling healing was, in many ways, avoidance. That’s when I made a choice that felt both terrifying and deeply necessary.

I chose to let myself unravel.

The Cost of Holding It Together

Anxiety doesn’t usually demand collapse. It’s far more patient than that. It’s content to coexist with competence. It will let you succeed, care for others, even teach mindfulness – so long as you don’t look too closely at the cost. For me, the cost was constant self-monitoring, exhaustion, a bracing against life and a background belief that if I loosened my grip, everything would fall apart.

Depression added another layer—not always sadness, but heaviness. A dulling of joy. A sense that life required effort just to meet the minimum requirements. I didn’t believe that I was in crisis, which made it easy to dismiss what I was experiencing. I told myself others had it worse. I told myself I should be grateful. I told myself to breathe, meditate, push through. But here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to face: much of my anxiety was fueled by the relentless effort to not feel what was actually there. I was managing symptoms, not listening to signals.

Why Unraveling Felt Like Failure

Letting myself unravel felt like the opposite of everything I’d been trained to value. We live in a culture that worships resilience, but often confuses it with endurance. We’re taught to “stay strong,” “keep going,” “don’t fall apart.” Emotional unraveling is framed as weakness, instability, or regression. Something to fix quickly. Something to hide.

As someone who teaches nervous system regulation, the irony wasn’t lost on me. I knew, intellectually, that suppression doesn’t equal healing. I understood trauma responses, stress physiology, and the cost of chronic hypervigilance. And still, that ‘knowing’ didn’t protect me from the fear that if I stopped holding everything together, I’d lose control.

I kept thinking ‘What if the anxiety overwhelmed me? What if the sadness swallowed me up? What if I became less useful, less capable, less able to take on my daily responsibilities. What if I became less… me?’ But beneath those fears was a quieter, wiser question: What if holding it together is the very thing that’s keeping this in place?

Choosing to Stop Resisting

Letting myself unravel felt like a dramatic decision at the time. I was still uncertain of what would or could happen, so I was a bit scared. As I committed to it, it didn’t happen in a single moment. It was more like a gradual surrender. Every day, many times a day, I would sink into the feeling of unravelling, stay there for some time, then come out. It’s important to note that I didn’t know what unravelling meant! I would simply say it, feel the feelings, sink into them with curiosity and compassion, and come back out. Instead of treating discomfort as a problem to solve, I began listening, feeling and opening up to them.

This didn’t mean indulging every thought or spiraling into rumination. It meant allowing sensations, emotions, and fatigue to exist without immediately trying to change them. It meant letting the tightness in my chest be there without trying to ignore it. Letting sadness move through without labeling it as failure. Letting anxiety rise and fall without interpreting it as danger. In nervous system terms, this was radical. I was stepping out of constant sympathetic control and into something far less familiar: trust.

What Unraveling Actually Looked Like

I remember asking my friend what unravelling meant to him. He said ‘Letting go of the need for control and the need for things to go a certain way, and being vulnerable with who I am and how I am doing’. Well, whatever it is, it certainly brought up a lot for me!

Here’s what it did look like:

• Crying without needing a reason (many times it was while watching America’s got talent).
• Being ok with feeling lost, alone and in pain.
• Being ok with chronically feeling fatigue
• Being (brutally, but compassionately) honest about things like what it feels like to be me everyday.
• Being ok with not knowing when the tension and pain will subside or go away.
• Letting my meditation practice be messy, unfocused, even uncomfortable.
• Allowing days where the only goal was rest.

Unraveling was not chaos. It was decompression. Like loosening a knot that had been pulled too tight for too long.

The Fear Beneath the Anxiety

One of the most surprising things I discovered was this: beneath my anxiety wasn’t danger – it was grief. Grief for years spent bracing. Grief for the time that I had lost to this thing that I didn’t understand. Grief for the relationships I had negatively affected because I was sometimes acting out of pain. Grief for how long I’d been at war with my own nervous system.

When I stopped resisting, these layers surfaced naturally. And while that wasn’t always pleasant, it was honest. My body wasn’t malfunctioning—it was communicating. Anxiety had been trying to keep me safe. Depression had been trying to slow me down. Neither were enemies. They were messengers that had been ignored for too long.

What Emerged on the Other Side

This process is by no means complete. It feels like a lifetime process of experimentation, learning and growing. My original fear of the unknown has been replaced with trust and some pleasant surprises along the way. I’m starting to feel like I understand what genuine calm is, what true joy is and what a sense of self is that is no longer defined by managing anxiety. I didn’t become a different person. I felt like my life became richer on all ends of the spectrum and I became less defensive.

My anxiety and depression became experiences rather than identities. Weather patterns rather than permanent climates.

And one of the changes that felt the most radical is that I am now ok with asking to be held. I know, crazy huh? I thought it was outrageous of me to do that a few years ago. Now I curl up like a cat and soak it up.

Why This Matters

If you’re living with chronic anxiety or depression, you’ve probably been praised for your strength. For how well you function. For how much you carry. But strength without softness becomes armor. And armor eventually becomes a cage.

Letting yourself unravel doesn’t mean giving up. It means telling the truth. It means allowing the intelligence of your body to participate in the healing process. Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is stop trying to be okay.

A Different Definition of Healing

Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t about returning to who you were before anxiety or depression showed up. It’s about becoming someone who no longer needs to fight their inner world. Letting myself unravel didn’t break me. It gave me back to myself.

And if you’re standing at the edge of that same decision—wondering whether it’s safe to loosen your grip – I’ll offer this gently: You don’t unravel because you’re weak. You unravel because you’re ready – ready to stop surviving, to stop managing and to finally listen.

Sometimes, that’s where real healing begins.

David Procyshyn is a leading voice in the world of wellness — a writer, speaker, story-teller, yoga and meditation teacher, and founder of DoYogaWithMe, who blends ancient practices with modern science to help people heal from chronic anxiety.

Check out his other articles related to this topic:

How to Relax Deeply (And Why It Can Be Hard to Do)
Why It’s So Hard to Be Vulnerable About Chronic Anxiety
When Your Thoughts Become You and What To Do About It