philosophy
Is it spiritually wrong in Hinduism to feel stressed or anxious?
What the tradition actually says
The Gita opens with Arjuna in deep distress. He is shaking, his bow drops, he cannot think clearly. This state even has a name in the tradition: vishada, which means grief or anguish. The Gita does not treat this as a sin or a failure. It treats it as a real human moment and a starting point. The whole teaching that follows grows out of it. So from the very beginning, the tradition takes anxiety seriously rather than dismissing it.
The mind as friend and enemy
The Gita does speak about the mind in a way that is sometimes misread. It says the mind can be your closest friend or your worst enemy, depending on whether you are caught inside it or can step back from it. This is not a judgement on people who feel anxious. It is pointing at something subtler: the difference between feeling a difficult emotion and being completely swallowed by it. The tradition sees chronic, unexamined identification with worry as something that causes suffering. But feeling anxious in the first place is not the problem.
Where the misconception comes from
Some people read ideas like equanimity, non-attachment, or inner calm and take them to mean that a spiritual person should never feel troubled. That reading is too simple. These ideas describe a kind of steadiness that the tradition says can be cultivated over time. They are not a standard that people are expected to already meet, and falling short of them is not a spiritual wrong.
Today
Many Hindus today hold both the tradition's ideas and a plain understanding that anxiety is a normal human experience. Sometimes it comes from life circumstances, loss, pressure, or illness, things that have nothing to do with spiritual state. The tradition's tools, whether that is meditation, prayer, or reflection, are offered as support, not as proof that a person should not have been struggling in the first place.