What is anxiety, why we experience it and how we experience it.

Introduction

Having a greater awareness and understanding of what anxiety is, why we experience it and how it manifests within ourselves is key to turning towards and taking appropriate steps to cope with and overcome it, rather than fearing it, trying to avoid it and giving it the control. ??

“With clarity comes choice and with choice comes change” (Kristine Janson, Mindfulness Association)

With a greater insight into anxiety, you have a heightened awareness of and can intentionally familiarise yourself with what is happening internally leading you to recognise, acknowledge, validate, accept, process, and manage what is going on for you.

Becoming more attune to your inner world and leads to an awareness of positive and negative external factors impacting your experience.

The result is being able to and seek relevant, bespoke interventions that suit your needs and circumstances allowing you to successfully cope, adapt, manage, navigate your way through it and live a life without limits.

I strongly believe that taking a biopsychosocial approach (introduced by George Engel in 1977), to gain understanding and explain anxiety is of significant importance. Through my 25 years experiences of working with anxiety, I would confidently conclude that anxiety is caused by, exacerbated by and resolved through the interdependence of all these factors. ?An integrated, holistic approach in understanding and resolving allows for a wider range of and more bespoke look into interventions, and this is reflected in the content of this article. ?

Why do you have anxiety and where does it come from?

To be anxious is to be human and although it can feel distressing and uncomfortable and can dictate how we navigate the world in an adverse way, anxiety is a very important part of the human experience.

It is our internal safety mechanism, and you need it. It is an innate, instinctual, and “normal” part of all sentient beings and is both helpful and adaptive in the short-term, so we do not want to and cannot completely rid ourselves of anxiety.

It is the term used to describe the internal sensations that we feel when we are faced with an external or internal threat, so it is here to keep us safe, it is here to keep us alive.

Biologically and evolutionarily speaking, it all starts in the primal part of our brain (reptilian brain), where you have the amygdala that is constantly scanning and looking out for danger (whether real or perceived) and as soon as it picks up something that it fears, it releasing adrenaline to get our body prepared for “dealing with” the threat, it does this by releasing ?adrenaline, cortisol, nor-adrenaline, all the stress hormones into our system.

For example, you might go into flight if you hear a fire alarm or see a fire, or you might go into fight response if a stranger were to grab you. You may fawn, which is when you try to appease someone to make a situation stop, or you may freeze, a response when you cannot move, you become detached and unable to respond which evolutionary speaking is like a rabbit that will play dead if a fox comes near.

We all have a level of fear around uncertainty and this reptilian part of the brain has not evolved or adapted to manage the multiple stressors we often experience in the present-day of 24/7 living. We are surrounded by and bombarded by a multitude of information, we have increasing employment pressures, the social pressures of parenthood, our hyperfocus on material wealth and concerns over global issues. The fear part of the brain has not adapted in a way to compensate for the wonderful capacity of imagination we have, our ability to visualise, the amount of stimulation we are party to and the repertoire of language we have, to describe it in detail.

The amygdala is internally triggered by the emotional significance of the threat as well as the presenting external threats, so our minds play a crucial role. ?The threat response is based on emotion, not logic or rational thinking so your body will automatically react, as a result we are having the same biological response to our boss not praising our work as our ancestors did upon seeing a sabre tooth tiger.

Stressors are a part of life and are real and can be overwhelming at times, so it is important to become aware of what is happening in our body and mind and the knock-on effect it has on our behaviour. If we don’t, we become hijacked by the stressors, and it begins to dictate the way we navigate through the world.

When Anxiety goes from being healthy and helpful to unhealthy and unhelpful?

Anxiety is helpful and healthy when you are in immediate danger and you need to react quicky, however, for some, our brain judges everything as dangerous and this becomes unhealthy and unhelpful as well as distressing.

It is unhelpful when the alarm response is switched on repeatedly without there being a real threat. When it is switched on too easily, too often and for too long. Phycologist Daniel Coleman used the term the “Amygdala Hijack” to describe this process, when the brain shuts off the part of rationale, reasonable responses. This persistence of the alarm becomes the core of anxiety disorders.

The way we respond.

Like all sentient beings, everything that makes you uniquely you is NOT inert; from conception and throughout your life pathways becomes forged (physically and metaphorically) through and by your experiences, strong emotions and the unique way you process and interpret these experiences. Beliefs about yourself and formed and guide how you fit into the world. Your likes, needs, wants, beliefs, values change through the accumulation of experiences and your time on the planet.

Your mental health is the same, changing momentarily, over days, weeks, months and/or years going up and down a sliding scale.?It can range from mild to severe and can last moments or unfold over a period of years. And just as you are unique, the way you experience anxiety and how this manifests, are also unique to you. Interventions are also going to differ depending upon how your stress, anxiety or overwhelm manifests.

Umbrella terms such as general anxiety disorder (GAD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety, agoraphobia, panic attacks or specific thoughts, feelings and behaviours such as, feeling you have lost your purpose, feeling unfulfilled, not good enough, disconnected from yourself and your body, brain fog, mood swings, feeling nauseous, shaky, tearful or the general feeling of unexplained fear.

Regardless of its origins, whether the threat is real or perceived or how it manifests, the symptoms and impact of anxiety is VERY real.

Points to consider.

Anxiety is often a fear of not being in control, but there is no control, no one has any control over the external world BUT you can control your internal world if you know how and this in turn will help to reduce anxiety regardless of the circumstances around it. Our external world can and will exacerbate feelings of anxiety due to its unpredictable nature, but you can learn to cope with the external environment via a process of internal transformations.

To enable some kind of internal control over anxiety and to begin to manage it, you must gain an understanding of how anxiety manifests in you as an individual, its potential origins and triggers. ??

Experiences and how you interpret them, emotions evoked, and the physical feelings evoked are all unique to YOU. There are no right or wrong ways to think and feel but it is important to know how to identify and therefore manage and responses appropriately and productively.

Why do some people experience such elevated levels of anxiety whilst other don’t?

There is unlikely one definitive reason, rather many interdependent factors that are the likely cause, including personality factors, prolonged feelings of stress, difficult life experiences, trauma, grief, domestic abuse, physical health, societal and cultural expectations, inter-generational trauma ????????(Dr Gabor Maté has much research in this area), genetic predisposition towards anxiety, familial connections, protective factors, social circle, money, status, ethnicity, gender and stigma.

A prominent factor of elevation is if anxiety is experienced over a long period, even if that anxiety is no longer present, our body physically holds the memory. If unresolved, the memory lingers in our nervous system causing dysregulation which leaves us with the feeling or sense of being out of control physically/internally as well as externally.

Once again, interconnection plays a role here because if this persists your baseline of calm is at a heightened level meaning your alarm system will trigger more easily. You must work to then re-set your nervous systems, learn to build capacity in response to situations which are safe, so it remembers the feeling of calm and safety in the body positively triggering your body back into the moment and the reality of the situation.

So, anxiety is the opposite of living in the moment. Anxiety is like a kind of time travel in our minds and flourishes via illusion, racing forward to fixate over what could go wrong or backward into rumination over what has already gone wrong.

The more you believe your thoughts and feel disconnected from your body the more you are reinforcing the pattern and the harder it becomes to control; you find yourself caught in a habit loop.

The Vagus nerve is another vital piece of the puzzle. There is little going on in your internal organs in which the Vagus nerve is not involved. It is the largest nerve in the body covering a stunning amount of ground. It takes readings and messages from the body, passing these onto the brain and back again. The body sends more messages to the brain that the brain sends to the body, and it is like a “neuronal superhighway.” (Deb Dana & Dr Stephen Porges 2018)

Our beliefs are also an important part of understanding ourselves and how they connect to why and how we feel and hold onto stress, anxiety and overwhelm. Limiting beliefs often drive this part of us and is something we all have, originating from past experiences, if your beliefs go unchallenged, they can prevent you getting what you want, what you deserve and what you are capable of. They are telling you a story about yourself that not based on fact, it’s a lie you have been believing since childhood. “You make your beliefs then your beliefs make you and if you heal the cause, the problem will not persist” (Marisa Peer). You can change your unwanted habits and behaviours through this method.

What not to do to reduce or resolve anxiety

Ignore it or try to avoid it.

The less you understand about it the more you fear it, the more you fear it the more you do anything to avoid it, the more you avoid it the worse it becomes. We do not like the feeling of anxiety and we are not meant to, so we tend to do everything we can to avoid it or numb it to make the feelings and sensations stop.

This is counterintuitive because the more we avoid it the less we understand it and the harder it is to go back to a naturally calm state where we feel in control and like we have autonomy over our body.

If you continue to avoid it, it stays with you. The time and energy moving around the anxiety is not only exhausting it will never leave you feeling less afraid in the long run.

Avoidance or numbing varies depending upon the triggers and symptoms are but common examples are staying home or avoiding certain places or people, eating too much or too little, drinking alcohol, shopping, caretaking or working as many hours as we can. All these management styles only exacerbate the anxiety you are experiencing.

Knowing all this, how do we find a more productive way to decrease the disruptive symptoms that anxiety brings?

I will be discussing this in further articles, however, a good place to start is really getting to know yourself so you can begin this journey knowing what you might need. ??

·???????Take time out of your day and sit with yourself, telling yourself that you have nothing to do and nowhere to be. Be curious and bring awareness to your thoughts, emotions, and physical feelings (no matter how uncomfortable these are). Don’t engage with them, try to justify them, or try to problem solve, use this time to just notice. Keep a journal of what you learn about yourself, and you will be begin to see patterns and themes emerge. ?

• Learning how anxiety feels in our body and learn what “normal” anxiety is. When you are feeling anxious or worried stop for a moment and notice how it feels. This is an important part of the journey because if you are feeling worried or stressed but can sit with that discomfort you will not automatically or compulsively do something to get rid of it.
• ?Although it may not feel like it, you are in control of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Your thoughts are real, but they are a representation of the life you have lived and the beliefs you have attached to the past. Start to notice, notice, tune in to and challenge your automatic thoughts and the stories you tell yourself. What is the counter evidence you have.
• ?This is a process so be kind to yourself - talk to yourself like you would talk to your best friend. No judgement, no right or wrong, no good or bad you are just starting noticing, to acknowledge, to validate and understand yourself.

Sources

• Much of my knowledge has come from the individuals I have met over my 25 year career. ??
• Marisa Peer (2021, 2022)
• Deb Dana (Polyvegal theory in therapy 2018 )
• Choden and Regan-Addis (Mindfulness Based Living Course 2017)
• Dr Alison Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit, 2015) ??