When anxiety rears up, reach for one of these...

If you suffer from problematic anxiety, some relief might come from the Hot Cross Bun model. Alongside a deeper exploration of your anxiety's origin, it can be a useful tool.

Anxiety is more than just a passing worry—it’s a persistent companion for far too many of us. Whether it’s the tight knot in your chest before a daunting task, the unshakeable dread of a restless night, or the sudden, searing rush of worry from what seems like nowhere—anxiety can feel omnipresent.

In a world that relentlessly demands our attention with notifications, deadlines, unsettling news from many directions, anxiety finds abundant fuel. And if our own lives contain times of powerful uncertainty, rejection, or pain, these moments may have planted deep-rooted patterns that still echo today. Emotional reflexes, automatic physical responses, resistant thought patterns: these can be the ghosts of what once happened. The world we now live in can amplifies those echoes, stirring them to life with the slightest trigger, even if that trigger doesn't seem to have any bearing on the original events.

One reason why anxious responses of old can keep recurring can be the fact the body has a kind of built–in 'smoke alarm'. It lives within part of our nervous system (the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to be precise) and it was forged in the furnace of our earliest survival needs; designed to protect us by sending us into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses in the face of threat.

In safe times, this system is balanced by the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS)—the soothing branch that invites rest, digestion, repair, and restoration. Ideally, the two work together, like accelerator and brake.

But when the SNS misfires—when the smoke alarm starts going off at the merest hint of a breeze—we can be catapulted into survival mode even when there’s no fire. A WhatsApp message pings, a seemingly harmless thought pops up, a comment is made, or an intrusive memory surfaces—and suddenly your body reacts as though you’re in the lion’s den. Even when the objective threat is absent, your body can still respond as though the danger is undeniably real.

There are in fact neurological reasons why that might be happening - to do with how difficult or traumatic memories from the past aren’t properly time-coded in key parts of the brain. It can mean that when an unrelated, though seemingly manageable stressor occurs in the present, the system lights up as if it was shouting “Oh my God, it’s happening again!”

As anyone who suffers badly from it will tell you, anxiety can feel truly disabling—it hijacks your nervous system before you even have a chance to think. Before you can get your rational brain online, the SNS has grabbed the controls of your feelings, thoughts and body and is swerving all over the road, telling you to run, fight, just freeze or even fawn to the source of the stress - if it’s a person - to make it all go away.

As an Integrative psychotherapist, my work is not about holding up one single model of therapy as 'the answer.' Instead, I work to find approaches that resonate with my clients—the ones that speak to who they are, what they’re experiencing, and what feels possible in the moment.

Different models bring different strengths. When it comes to calming anxiety in the moment Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has much to offer. It gives us tools for breaking anxiety’s spirals and regaining a sense of agency. One of its most useful tools is the Hot Cross Bun model.

The Hot Cross Bun Model

The Hot Cross Bun model - part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

The Hot Cross Bun* model is simple but powerful. It shows how four parts of our experience are constantly interacting:

• Thoughts

• Emotions

• Physical feelings

• Behaviours

  
  

These aren’t separate parts. They feed into each other, often so quickly it feels instantaneous.

Imagine this:

• A thought (“I can’t cope with this!”) triggers...

• A physical feeling (tight chest, racing heart), which intensifies...

• An emotion (fear, dread), which drives...

• A behaviour (avoid the whole thing, retreat, panic – or rage, and attack).

  
  

Or this:

·      An emotion (dread, unease) triggers...

·      A physical feeling (sick, shallow breathing, racing pulse), which prompts...

·      A behaviour (rushing home, ringing the emergency services)

·      A thought (“What’s wrong with me? Am I having a heart attack!? Where’s that ambulance!?”)

Or this:

·      A behaviour (skipping that party tonight) triggers...

·      A thought (“I’m such a loser, I should have gone, I always do this kind of thing.”), which prompts...

·      An emotion (hopelessness, shame) which drives...

·      A physical feeling (tired, drained).

The cycle keeps feeding itself. In the second scenario, it might loop straight back to an emotion - fear. In the third, it might loop back to behaviour again - opening that bottle of wine, or the next day declining another invite out too because of a sense of worthlessness. In fact the four elements can affect any of the others as the system is running - after a while it may not even resemble a sequence. Each element reinforces the others, and soon the whole system is swept away in a self-sustaining, intensifying loop of anxiety. Though many of us experience the opening salvo of this process as a thought, it can start with any of the elements (and sometimes when we look inside we detect that it did start with a feeling or a bodily sensation, in fact). The first warning sign of anxiety can appear anywhere. And the sooner we catch it, the more chance we have of using what we might call an internal firebreak—something that interrupts the cascade before it sweeps through the whole system.

Breaking the Flow

In CBT, the emphasis is often placed on thoughts and behaviours. That’s because changing raw feelings directly is notoriously difficult—the thinking brain struggles to override the powerful limbic system where emotions live. No matter where it started in the inner system, if we can step in effectively at the level of thoughts or behaviour, we’ve got a good chance of disrupting the loop.

Doing that involves first mentally trying to step away from the cycle of anxiety. Create a pause. Perhaps imagine you’re in a helicopter looking down on this whole spin-cycle of distress. You’re not in the cycle – you are looking at it. Notice the thoughts you are having (that’s right – you can have thoughts about your thoughts). Gently challenge those thoughts from this standpoint - by questioning if they’re entirely accurate, or by gently reframing them. If you can mentally step away a little, you have a chance of breaking the spiral.

Changing behaviour can be powerful too. Doing something different can reset the entire system—stimulating new thoughts, fresh feelings, and calmer bodily responses. For example, going for a short walk, reaching out to someone you trust, even deliberately and consciously doing something unrelated in the moment, without reflecting on it. Wash the kitchen floor. Empty the dishwasher. Cut the garden hedge. Whatever.

Calming the body can also be hugely helpful. Slow breathing can soothe the nervous system with an improved flow of oxygen. Grounding techniques, or simply noticing and relaxing tense muscles can influence both feelings and thoughts, and create more space so that you can mentally pause, pull away and look at what’s going - as if from that helicopter.

The Hot Cross Bun model gives you multiple entry points. Wherever anxiety first shows up—whether in a racing chest, a spiralling thought, a gnawing feeling, or an anxious behaviour—you can step in to prevent the whole cycle from being hijacked.

When Feelings Seem to Arrive Out of Nowhere

We tend to think of anxiety as something that’s triggered. That’s often true (although some of us may well be wired to feel it more acutely). But sometimes we may have little idea where that trigger came from and then we’re left trying to make sense of it. A common example is the concept of morning dread—a hazy, heavy sense of fear that can greet us the moment we open your eyes in the morning, as if from nowhere. It's a horrible, incomprehensible sensation and it may well have nothing at all to do with what lies ahead for us that day - something that makes it all the more puzzling.

This feeling could have a number of triggers (none of which we might be easy to identify), including a troubled night’s sleep caused by stresses we’re carrying in daily life. Nightmares, which replay old anxieties or unresolved emotions may be part of this.

Or it could also be the actual process of waking up. When we are waking up, the body produces a surge of cortisol and adrenaline—the so-called ‘stress hormones’ —to help us become alert. For most people, this gives just enough energy to start the day. But if our sympathetic nervous system is hypersensitive – if you’ve maybe been chronically anxious or depressed, if that smoke alarm is set to go off at the slightest trigger, that hormone rush can set it off. A strange dread floods through us as we lie there.  And next? The brain, always trying to find the meaning of things, searches for reasons. “Why do I feel so frightened? It must be because…”  And the anxious thoughts come flooding in.

This is the Hot Cross Bun model in action. As we wake, the body generates a feeling (dread), which prompt thoughts (“something’s wrong”), which shape behaviours (avoidance, agitation) and keeps us in bed. The cycle, in this scenario, starts in the body (which has done something - its a behaviour) —but it then sweeps through the whole system unless interrupted. Avoidance in this case might mean just not wanting to get out of bed at all. That’s understandable (and of course, when we are deeply depressed we may simply not be able to face the world). But, if you can, get up. Avoid the prospect of lying there perpetuating the cycle and reinforcing negative thoughts, perhaps with feelings of self-loathing driven by not feeling capable of even getting out of bed? Movement will also help the cortisol and adrenaline disperse and signal that the body doesn’t need an injection of them any more.

The rest of the story

CBT can be very valuable as a therapeutic approach, but in my work I keep in mind that it’s far from the only way in to some of these questions. Anxiety is rarely just a malfunctioning system. Though some of us have inherited a genetic predisposition to it, it usually got started somewhere. To return to the smoke alarm metaphor – when the damned thing is screaming then all we'll want is some way of turning it off. But at some point it needs repairing – we’ll need to take it down and look at what’s gone wrong with it – perhaps even deciding to replace it with an alarm that works properly.

For many people, troublesome anxiety isn’t random. It’s a legacy of unhealed experiences. A time when it wasn’t safe to relax, or a time of danger.  A period when the world felt overwhelming, and vigilance was necessary for survival. It might have been when we were growing up, or to do with some trauma we went through; part of an early-warning and self-defence system, keeping us safe from serious risk—emotional or physical—that we couldn’t cope with back then.

Seen in this light, anxiety is not an enemy, but a protector that has become overzealous. It continues its vigilance even now, long after the original danger may have passed. So alongside working with managing anxiety in the moment, therapy might also involve tracking the anxiety back to its roots and exploring what this original response was created for? What’s it still trying to protect you from? This is slower, deeper work. Once we’ve stopped the alarm going off incessantly, it involves listening to anxiety as a messenger rather than fighting it as an enemy. What is it afraid will happen if you lower your guard? What memory or wound is it trying to push you away from in case you can’t cope?

Sometimes, when people start to explore this, they discover that their anxiety has been guarding a tender place—an unhealed grief, a shame-laden memory, a fear of rejection, or a younger part of themselves that still feels scared. The circumstances that made it arise may be long gone, but the system that emerged to warn you of danger or impending hurt is still out there doing its thing, stuck in the ‘on’ position.

When we combine these approaches—skills to calm anxiety and compassionate exploration to find its roots—we create the possibility of a new relationship with it. Anxiety may not vanish from our lives, but it doesn’t have to run the show. We can learn to spot its signals early, to interrupt the spirals and begin the longer journey of healing.

******** * If you're not familiar with the Hot Cross Bun, check out their back story here. They're delicious. Jo Shaw is a psychotherapist practicising in Kent and London, UK, both face-to-face and online. She can be reached at jo@jjstherapy.com