Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

There is often no clear single cause of anxiety. You may know the situation that triggered it, but the roots of it usually go back much further. Where a traumatic event triggered PTSD, that may be the sole cause of the anxiety. But for most people, they have built up a store of suppressed emotions, and developed a habit of suppressing emotions over many years, often dating back to childhood.

Then an event one day, or a situation over time, triggered a release of some strong emotions to which you reacted with fear and anxiety. You then reacted to those feelings of anxiety with more fear, setting up a cycle of increasing anxiety. This became the focus of your thoughts, your nervous system became highly sensitized, and you slipped into the anxiety state.

The cause of the anxiety is irrelevant in terms of our recovery from it. We cannot go back and change the past, so we have to deal with where we are in this moment. First and foremost, we need to learn a better, healthier way of responding to and dealing with our emotions. Second, we must allow our bottled up emotions to gradually release over time.

A lot of our emotions are triggered in our subconscious. For this reason we may be completely unaware it is happening until we experience significant symptoms and feelings. Also, because our nervous system is highly sensitized already, our reaction to any intense feeling such as sadness, loneliness, anger, frustration etc. tends to be one of fear/anxiety. Any time an intense emotion is triggered, we experience a sudden wave of strong anxiety. This seems to happen for no apparent reason, or come “out of nowhere”. Sometimes we can be aware of what triggered the anxiety, but often we are not.

Secondly, as anxiety sufferers, we have tended to suppress any strong feelings. So when an emotion is triggered we experience an exaggerated reaction, well beyond what would seem appropriate for the situation. We don’t always connect the anxiety to the trigger, and this is why anxiety can be so bewildering. Things don’t add up. Logical reasoning doesn’t work.

And finally, although we have been quite successful at numbing ourselves to most of our unwanted emotions, anxiety doesn’t respond to our attempts to suppress it. It has become the feeling that we most fear and hate. That is why anxiety shows up when anger, sadness or some other emotion is triggered. We have developed a pattern of reacting with anxiety to any stresses, tensions, concerns, or intense feelings in our life.

It’s important to understand that anxiety is a bodily reaction to anxious thoughts. Your nervous system is getting you ready for “fight or flight”. It does this by pumping adrenaline and other hormones and chemicals into your bloodstream so you are ready to run away or defend yourself. Because of the fearful thoughts it believes you are under threat and that it is doing what is necessary to keep you safe.

The problem is, the fearful thoughts are inappropriate to the situation, and the reaction of your nervous system gives you more symptoms of anxiety (raised heart rate, sweating, shallow breathing etc.). These feelings worry you, and you become bewildered as to why it is happening to you. You try to figure out what on earth could be causing this much anxiety, why you are reacting that way, and why you can’t seem to stop it.

The more we analyze and search desperately for an answer, the more anxiety we create. I have found that we do not need to solve anything, and that analysis actually keeps us stuck in our thoughts, and works against our recovery. We need to move from our thoughts into our feelings. Feel. Don’t think.

To put it simply, anxiety doesn’t respond to our desire and attempts to avoid it or stop it. In fact, doing so is fighting it, and fighting anxiety is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It adds energy to it, and makes it worse. The way to reduce our anxiety is to stop adding fuel to it. That means simply allowing it to burn itself out. But like an intense fire, even after we stop adding fuel anxiety takes a while to die down.

Anxiety sufferers are desperate for peace, so they typically have difficulty finding the patience to face and allow their feelings, or to rust that this approach will work. Not only does it work, but it is the only path I know to full and lasting recovery.

Any attempts at a quick fix are doomed to fail, because they won’t have changed the underlying habit of reacting to anxiety with resistance and fighting. We have a habit that is ingrained, and it is not changed in a day or a week or a month. It takes prolonged consistent practice of a new way to respond to anxiety in order to permanently change this default reaction. It must become our automatic and unconscious way of responding to feelings of anxiety.

Anxiety is a trickster, an impersonator and impostor. It latches on to anything that we fear. So if we get a symptom that concerns us, our anxiety starts bringing up thoughts about how much we hate it, what might be causing it, how serious it might be, and whether the symptom will ever go away. The symptom quickly becomes both the focus of our thinking, and also the source for great anxiety.

If that symptom goes away, then our anxiety looks for the next thing that triggers some fear, and latches on to that. It can multi-task too, and have us anxious about multiple different things at once. If we read about a disease, we can also develop the very symptoms associated with that disease, simply because we had a fearful thought about contracting it. We can have a bewildering mix of symptoms that we wouldn’t typically associate with anxiety, and make no sense. For that reason, we often conclude we must have some serious, incurable or terminal illness or condition – a thought that ramps our anxiety up to new heights.

In this situation, we often seek reassurance from doctors. Yet even when tests tell us there is nothing wrong, or that it is simply anxiety, our relief is very short-lived. When the symptoms persist, we conclude they must have missed something. And even if we get treatments for some of the symptoms, no sooner have those gone than our anxiety finds a new set to worry us.

In my experience working with hundreds of anxiety sufferers, I can say there are some very common traits amongst them. They tend to be very sensitive and compassionate people, often introverted and reflective. The sensitivity may make them more prone than the average person to intense feeling and emotions, and therefore be more likely to experience a need to suppress those feelings. I believe it is this emotional suppression that sets the stage for future anxiety issues.

Anxiety sufferers also have a history that contributed to their backlog of suppressed emotion. That may be a difficult upbringing, or repression of their emotional expression in their childhood. They may also have suffered traumatic events that overwhelmed them emotionally, and they developed the habit of suppressing emotions as a means to cope and survive.

The final commonality is that they experienced a situation or event that triggered a strong emotional reaction, and they were no longer able to keep the lid on their bottled up emotions. And the emotion that will not be contained and pushes to the front is anxiety. The key to recovery is to learn how to release those bottled up emotions in a gentle, gradual, natural way.