Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.

Roche likens anxiety to a small but persistent seep of fear: initially narrow, it seems manageable, yet it steadily reshapes the mind’s landscape. The metaphor of water cutting a channel suggests habit and reinforcement—when anxiety is “encouraged” (fed by rumination, avoidance, or catastrophic thinking), it becomes the default pathway for attention. The result is cognitive narrowing: other thoughts, perceptions, and possibilities are pulled into the anxious groove and lose their independence. The line anticipates modern psychological descriptions of worry as an attentional bias and self-perpetuating loop, emphasizing that the danger of anxiety lies less in its first appearance than in the way it can become a dominant mental pattern.