Anxiety is Natural
It’s worth taking a little time to understand how anxiety works. This helps us put our suffering into perspective, and recognize some of the ways in which we are being deceived by it.
Anxiety is a natural emotion in our everyday life. It is a normal and essential reaction to a threat, and is the body’s mechanism to prepare us to deal with danger. Anxiety is the mind and body’s attempt to protect us. It heightens our metabolism and releases enzymes, chemicals and hormones including adrenaline and cortisol into our blood. This in turn triggers increased heart rate, elevated body temperature, sweating, muscle tension, raised blood pressure and many other physiological and psychological changes intended to get us ready to fight, freeze or flee in the face of real and imminent danger.
Anxiety was most important to us in primitive times when we were frequently faced with life-threatening situations. In these cases, action might be the difference between life and death. Today, we rarely face such existential threats, but we do have highly stressful lives. Everyday life stresses can trigger this ancient survival reaction even if it is not warranted. For most people this anxiety response is generally not severe, and fades when the situation ends and the stress is lifted. However, in certain circumstances it can become a problem.
The Anxiety State
When our anxiety levels have become inappropriate, excessive or prolonged, we may be considered to be in the anxiety sate. Typically we experience one, or a combination, of the following:
- Our anxious reactions to stressful situations are completely over the top;
- Our anxiety does not fade quickly after the triggering situation is resolved;
- We become highly anxious in situations that don’t warrant it;
- We feel anxious most or all of the time, irrespective of what is happening.
How Anxiety Became an Issue
Though when and why it happened is irrelevant to recovery, it may be worth explaining the basic mechanism of entering the anxiety state.
At some point in time we reacted to a thought, feeling or situation with fear, triggering a bodily reaction of anxiety. In response to the resulting symptoms and feelings of anxiety we added more fear, triggering an increased bodily reaction. This in turn created more intense symptoms of anxiety, which we found highly unpleasant, and we reacted with even more fear. We both feared and desperately wanted to avoid experiencing the feelings of anxiety. In this way we inadvertently set up a fear-anxiety-fear cycle which spiraled out of control.
We developed a fear of being anxious. Subsequently we began adding second fear (the fear of anxiety) to any primary fear that we had. Our reactions to anxiety became exaggerated, and very easily triggered. In other words we became sensitized to, and afraid of, anxiety.
Changes in Behavior
Any thoughts, symptoms, feelings or situations that we associated with anxiety would trigger a response that was exaggerated and highly unpleasant. We began to fear those too. To “cope” with these fears, we fought against any feelings of anxiety. We tried to suppress them, or we avoided things that might trigger anxiety. We changed our behavior.
For example, if we became fearful of sweating (because our minds associated raised body temperature with anxiety), perhaps we began to avoid exercise or workouts. Or if we feared blushing or feelings of embarrassment/shame, we avoided social interactions.
Our Efforts Make Things Worse
In the moment, these changes in behavior might have been successful in helping us reduce or avoid symptoms, but they did not reduce our sensitization. Inevitably the feelings came flooding back, possibly stronger than before. We tried to fight or avoid our anxiety with more and more desperation, but if anything it just seemed to get stronger. Our efforts seemed to drag us deeper into the anxiety state and keep the whole thing going.
We tried to solve the problem by analyzing our thoughts and what we do. We tried to figure out how we got into the anxiety state thinking that by doing this we ought to be able to find our way out. But the analyzing went round and round in circles leading nowhere. We became exhausted and fell into despair. There did not seem to be any way out.
Despair Sets In
We just want to be free from anxiety, or to get our old life back. We want to feel joy and enthusiasm for life again, to feel good, and reconnect with friends and family, but we just feel stuck, isolated, scared and miserable. One of our big fears is the idea that we may be going crazy. We despair of ever getting better, and begin to believe we are going to be this way for the rest of our life.
We may have had brief periods of feeling OK where our thinking seemed “normal” again, but sooner or later we slipped back into the anxiety state. Nothing we have tried seems to make any real or lasting difference. We feel completely bewildered by how things can seem so different from one day or even one hour to the next. Our energy is totally depleted and we lack motivation. We feel depressed.
Good News… Anxiety is Curable!
Despite all of this seeming like a complicated problem without a solution, the good news is that in fact it is all a bluff. The anxiety state has convinced us that it is a serious and probably incurable condition.
However, in reality the anxiety state is simply a temporary condition that is caused by and maintained by the way we think. We have developed some unhelpful ways of thinking about anxiety and reacting to it; that’s all. These can be changed, and when we change them we will recover.
One of the most common thoughts we have is that our anxiety is worse than anyone else’s and so cannot be cured. Another is that our particular form of anxiety is somehow different from anyone else’s (unique) and so it’s incurable.
Nonsense! This is all just the gloom and doom thinking that accompanies the anxiety state, and it simply isn’t true.
It doesn’t matter how long we have been in this state. It doesn’t matter how powerful or unbeatable our anxiety feels. Nor does it matter what form our anxiety takes, or what symptoms we have.
In each case, the anxiety state has the same basic underlying thought patterns. And because that is the case, the same acceptance-based recovery approach will work for all anxiety types.
Here are some of the more common Anxiety Types.