Understanding Anxiety

Anxiety can feel overwhelming because it can be all consuming. It can cause you to feel out of control of your body or push people away because people think you "over-react" about little things. It can make you question the validity of relationships or stop you from going out and having a good time. People may have told you to "stop worrying so much" or "calm down, it's not a big deal." While most of these people have good intentions, it doesn't help because you can't just turn off anxiety. You wish you could calm down and not worry, but you just can't. The first step in better coping with anxiety is understanding where it comes from and how it works.

Evolutionarily, anxiety has kept the human race alive by keeping us wary of new things, i.e. Grug, the father in The Crudes. While it has its place and exists in everyone, disordered anxiety happens when it gets generalized to aspects of your life that should not provoke anxiety. For example, it is natural for most people to freak out if a snarling lion were to jump in front of them right now. Your brain thinks that you are in immediate danger and starts the fight, flight, or freeze response: your heart starts rushing, you start sweating, your breathing increases, you start looking for exits, and you worry about how you are going to survive. Disordered anxiety is when this reaction comes from non-life threatening things such as meeting new people, going to the doctor, making mistakes, etc.

Disordered anxiety usually starts after what your brain perceives as a traumatizing event. Take social anxiety for example. As a child, someone might be afraid of speaking in front of people because it's a new experience. If they stand in front of the class for show and tell and they get laughed at, they may feel rejected and insecure and their brain may cement that in their memory. Now, they fear making friends because every time they think of meeting new people, their brain subconsciously remembers that experience and all the other past experiences of rejection causing them to not want to try.

So, the brain is a very good persuader. It can focus on all the things that cause us distress instead of automatically focusing on the good experiences we have had. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on retraining your brain to do exactly that. You have to practice reframing the negative thoughts in order to override what your brain is used to doing. This is not to say that you are just "focusing on the positive." It takes a lot of work to understand where your anxiety comes from, what triggers it, and what it would be like to overcome it. You are actively choosing to fight to live the life that you want.