How anxiety learned to dress up as passion — and what to do when you can’t tell the difference
“Not everything intense is love.
Sometimes it is anxiety wearing a romance costume.”
The first time you heard something like this, something may have shifted. Not because it was new, exactly — but because it named something you’d felt and never quite had language for. That breathless, consuming, can’t-stop-thinking-about-them feeling. We call it falling in love. We write songs about it. We chase it. But what if, sometimes, what we’re chasing is our nervous system on high alert?
This is not a cynical question. It’s a compassionate one. And it’s one that three of the most evidence-based frameworks in modern psychology have a great deal to say about.
The problem with intensity
High-performing professionals are, almost by definition, people who have learned to interpret intensity as signal. Intensity means something matters. Intensity means you care. In work, that calibration often serves you — urgency drives results. But in relationships, the same wiring can lead you somewhere you didn’t intend to go.
The body doesn’t clearly distinguish between the adrenaline of excitement and the adrenaline of threat. Racing heart, hyperawareness, the magnetic pull toward a person — these are equally consistent with secure attachment and with anxiety. The costume, as Baya Voce puts it, fits very well.
So how do you tell the difference? Let’s look at what three therapeutic frameworks have to say.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: are you choosing, or clinging?
ACT draws a sharp distinction between values-driven action and avoidance-driven action. When we are genuinely in love, we move toward someone because of who they are and what we want to build. When we are anxious, we move toward someone because the alternative — the uncertainty, the loss, the aloneness — feels unbearable.
ACT calls this cognitive fusion: we have merged so completely with the thought “this must be love” that we stop questioning it. The intensity becomes its own evidence. ACT invites a different question — not how much do I feel? but what is this feeling in service of?
The practice of defusion — observing your inner experience rather than becoming it — creates just enough space to ask: is this warmth, or is this urgency? Am I drawn to this person, or am I driven? Love tends to feel like expansion. Anxiety tends to feel like need.
Crucially, ACT points out that what looks like devotion — the constant texting, the vigilance, the difficulty being apart — is often experiential avoidance: a way of not sitting with the more vulnerable question of whether you actually feel safe.
Compassion Focused Therapy: which system is running the show?
CFT offers a beautiful neurological map for this confusion. It describes three emotional systems operating inside us at all times: the threat system (alert, scanning, reactive), the drive system (seeking, wanting, pursuing), and the soothing system (safe, warm, connected).
Healthy love lives primarily in the soothing system. It feels grounded. Calm. Like coming home. Anxiety, by contrast, activates the threat system — and here’s the twist — the drive system often joins in, flooding the experience with dopamine-laced urgency that feels indistinguishable from passion.
This is why the anxiety-as-love experience is so compelling. You’re getting a neurochemical cocktail of hypervigilance and reward-seeking that feels electric. The problem is that it isn’t sustainable — and it isn’t the same as love.
CFT brings particular compassion to this confusion, because it understands where it comes from. Many people who struggle to distinguish intensity from intimacy grew up in environments where love was anxious — where affection was conditional, unpredictable, or hard-won. Their nervous system didn’t learn that safety and love go together. It learned that love lives on the knife-edge of loss. Of course the soothing system feels like indifference. It has barely been exercised.
The work, in CFT terms, is not self-criticism for the confusion — it is gentle re-education of a system that was doing its best with what it had.
The Gottman Method: what’s actually building the house?
John and Julie Gottman spent decades studying what actually makes relationships last — and their findings are quietly radical. The dramatic moments, the grand gestures, the passionate arguments — these predict almost nothing about a relationship’s health or longevity. What predicts it are the small, quiet, unremarkable moments of turning toward each other.
The Gottmans call these bids for connection — a glance, a question, a touch, a small piece of shared news. In secure relationships, partners notice and respond to these bids. In anxious ones, both partners are often too flooded to see them.
Flooding is the Gottman term for physiological overwhelm — when the nervous system is so activated that the capacity for empathy, humour, and nuance essentially shuts down. Chronically anxious relationships produce chronic flooding. And flooding is easily mistaken for passion, because it too feels overwhelming and all-consuming.
But there is a difference between being overwhelmed by feeling and being overwhelmed by fear. The Gottman model asks: is there a foundation of trust and positive sentiment here — a sense that this person is basically on my side? Or is the intensity filling a structural void?
Intensity, in this framework, is often the symptom of a house with missing floors.
So what does love actually feel like?
All three frameworks converge on something that might, initially, sound disappointing: real love is quieter than you think.
| Anxiety in Costume | Love |
|---|---|
| Urgent, contingent, scanning | Grounding, spacious, stable |
| Driven by fear of loss | Driven by values and choice |
| Threat & drive systems activated | Soothing system engaged |
| Flooding; high-alert baseline | Trust; turning toward small bids |
| Intensity fills structural gaps | Intensity arises from abundance |
This doesn’t mean love is boring. It means its intensity has a different quality — it expands rather than constricts, it energises rather than depletes, it allows you to be more yourself rather than a performance of the self you think this person needs.
A note for high achievers specifically
If you’re reading this as someone who operates at a high level professionally, this particular confusion may be especially worth examining. High performers are often drawn to intensity as a metric of meaning — and for good reason. In many domains, feeling this activated really does mean something important is happening.
But relationships require a different intelligence. The skills that make you excellent in high-stakes professional environments — urgency, hypervigilance, tolerance for sustained pressure — are not the skills that build intimacy. And the qualities that do build it — patience, softness, the willingness to be boring together — can feel, to a nervous system trained on performance, like stagnation.
The question is worth sitting with: have you been pursuing relationships with the same energy you bring to a challenge at work? And if so, is the intensity you’re feeling the signal you think it is — or is it just your most familiar gear?
Baya Voce’s observation is funny because it’s true — anxiety does put on a very convincing costume. But it’s also an act of profound kindness to yourself to learn to recognise it. Not to stop feeling deeply, but to get curious about what you’re actually feeling. The goal isn’t less intensity. It’s intensity that knows where it comes from.