We know that anxiety influences how people attend to, interpret, and respond to potential threats and to new information. We also know that one important influence on the success or failure of an attempt to persuade are the characteristics of the source in the eyes of the target. Sources that are viewed as credible, and particularly sources that are seen as trustworthy, have greater success in persuading targets. We draw on work in psychology which finds that high levels of anxiety generates hypervigiliance to threats and reduces trust in others. Building on this like of research, we theorize that even trustworthy sources will be unable to persuade more anxious targets. We test our hypotheses with a factoral survey experiment, drawing participants from residents of internally displaced person (IDP) camps in northeastern Nigeria. We find that information from a more trustworthy, but not from a more knowledgeable, source leads to increased return intentions. However, this result only holds for participants who report lower levels of anxiety. Among particpiants reporting greater anxiety, even trustworthy information sources did not change return intentions.