Anxiety is a major emotional disorder manifested in the individual’s expectation of future threats. The incidence rate of anxiety is about 7.3%, with the highest lifetime prevalence rate among mental health conditions. The mechanism of anxiety overlaps with depression, and anxiety is a typical symptom of various mental diseases or emotional disorders in traditional Chinese medicine. The high rates of comorbidity and disability pose serious threats to people’s health. Animal models are important tools for studying anxiety and are of great use for deciphering the pathogenesis of anxiety and for developing drugs. The traditional paradigm of stress-induced anxiety, however, is relatively limited. Based on traditional theory combined with clinical and animal experimental data, we propose a new hypothesis of “insufficiency of ZhiYi’ causing anxiety, defined as “an anxiety state induced by the inability of an individual to meet their own needs, limited or lacking after multiple attempts, rendered hindered and powerless by an inability to meet their desires”. This hypothesis is more in line with the typical manifestations of despair, lack of pleasure, and social withdrawal in clinical patients, and is supported by traditional theory and experimental data showing “hunger but unable to eat, food but unable to obtain, and gain but not full”. Based on this, the established modeling paradigm is easy to apply, with good repeatability and low cost, and can be used to establish anxiety models in rats and mice, to provide a theoretical and model basis for the development and pharmacological evaluation of antianxiety drugs.