One of the best ways to stay anxious is to be inflexible. The biggest reason why many anxiety sufferers are inflexible is because they think in absolute terms. Everything is all or nothing. In other words, you don't just get chest pain, you get potential heart attacks. You don't just get headaches, but potential brain tumors and so on. Learning how to break the chains of absolute thinking is essential to getting rid of your abnormal anxiety. At the height of my anxiety illness I'd always rely on my best guess about what was going on