More than any other task, your brain’s job is to keep you alive. It’s wired for survival. It does this, in part, by recognizing patterns that signal a threat and convincing you to avoid them. When working optimally, this system might convince you not to walk down a darkened alley, or to drive slower in a rainstorm.
Your brain is also wired to help you avoid situations where the threat is emotional rather than physical, or where there may be unwanted consequences. So, it might prompt you to put in extra preparation for an important presentation or exam, or to rehearse for a performance.
This anxiety is unpleasant, but it can serve a functional role in your life.
Problems Arise When Your Brain is Too Good at This Job.
Anxiety becomes problematic when the physical or mental response is out of proportion to the actual threat posed. You may rationally know that you won’t literally die if you mess up a public speech or that the other people in the gym probably aren’t judging you. But, if the anxiety watchdog in your brain is convinced otherwise, your experience of these events can be deeply troubling.
Are you experiencing excessive anxiety?
- Persistent or invasive thoughts focused on a worry or fear
- Physical tension, muscle tightness, body pain
- Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
- Feeling edgy, restless or jumpy
- Avoiding or withdrawing from social situations
- Avoiding or procrastinating tasks and conversations where you feel evaluated or judged
- Loss of sexual desire or difficulty getting or maintaining an erection
- Loss of appetite, excessive appetite, or digestive distress
The Role of Anxiety in Your Life:
Anxiety’s job is to shape or limit your behavior. However, those limitations can have negative effects on your ability to lead your life in a meaningful way. Anxiety sufferers tend to rely on two strategies when interacting with their experience: avoidance and rumination. Both represent an attempt by the brain to solve an unsolvable problem. Both may be temporarily successful, but fail to provide long-term relief.
Feelings of Distress
Perhaps you worry more often or feel fear more strongly than those around you. You may think that you’re over-reacting, but you’re still unable to stop. Troubling thoughts and invasive memories may keep you on edge. There is no getting around that anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion.
Social Situations
Anxiety may be prompted by meeting new people, or in social settings. It may make it difficult to date or develop relationships. Fear of an anxiety attack may prevent you from engaging in activities. Coping mechanisms like drinking alcohol might be temporarily successful, but carry long term risks.
Anxiety can also be hard on those around you. It has been linked to marital distress and a decline in relationship satisfaction. Fear makes it difficult to be vulnerable, which is needed to deepen intimate relationships. Some of the strategies we use to minimize our experience of anxiety (e.g. lying or withholding information) can negatively impact the people closest to us, undermining their trust and safety.
Academics and Career
Anxiety can seriously impact your performance at work or school. Research has shown anxiety to interfere with students ability to attain educational goals, resulting in dropped classes, withdrawals from school, avoiding classes that require performance or deciding not to pursue desired degree programs.
Additionally, anxiety has been shown to predict longer periods of unemployment, more missed days of work, reduced productivity and lower salaries.
People often seek treatment when their anxiety starts interfering with reaching goals. Perhaps you are focusing more on your anxiety and less on your school or the daily tasks of your job. You may have difficulty talking in front of others, or talking with your boss. This can keep you from showing your true potential.
Your Relationship
As long as the interactions in your relationship are dictated by anxiety, trust, intimacy and satisfaction will elude you.
For some, the fear of loss, rejection, or failure interferes with willingness to commit to the work and frustrations of a relationship. Even in long-term relationships, they may try to maintain this distance. Communication, especially relating to difficult subjects, can be problematic.
For others, the desire to stay in their partner’s good graces prompts them to give more to their relationship than they are willing to ask for in return. Relationship care-takers often feel unworthy of love and affection, or that they must earn that caring by suppressing their own needs and desires.
This pattern frequently results in depression, especially in men.
Anxiety Doesn’t Cause Problems in Your Life. Your Response to it May.
Take a moment and think about your physical symptoms of anxiety. Not the thoughts, or emotions, just the visceral experience. Muscle tension, elevated heart rate, sweating, heightened or unfocused energy, “thrills” in your stomach, loss of appetite, or difficulty getting to sleep.
Now think about the physical sensations (without thoughts or emotions) you get when you’re excited. Muscle tension, elevated heart rate, sweating, heightened or unfocused energy, “thrills” in your stomach, loss of appetite, or difficulty getting to sleep. Physically, they’re exactly the same. Whether we are anticipating or dreading an event, our body receives the same information, the same instructions. The only difference is what our brain tells us this means, what the story is that we tell ourselves about the events.
The only way out of anxiety is through it
The treatment of choice for fear of public speaking, with good data to support it, is a group called Toast Masters. As the name implies, this is a group where you practice public speaking in front of an audience, and receive feedback on your performance. Only by going through with the act, while feeling anxious, does your brain realize that it’s not that dangerous.
Does that mean you can get to a point where you have zero anxiety? Probably not. Anxiety, after all, is one of the primary functions of your brain.
You can, however, make it much smaller and get to a point where it’s no longer shaping (or derailing your life). I was once diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder; now I talk to strangers for a living. I teach classes and give public talks. I don’t feel nervous when meeting new clients (anymore), but the first five seconds of every public presentation is terrifying. And then I relax, and I even enjoy the experience. How’d I get there? By being terrified, and doing it anyway. Realizing I survived, and then doing it again.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is an Evidence Based Approach to Treating Anxiety
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced Act, not A.C.T.—we’re very particular about that) is a mindfulness-based therapy protocol that does not seek to remove your unpleasant thoughts and feelings, but rather to change your relationship to them. Here’s the thing, you’re not actually in charge of what you think, or how you feel. (Don’t imagine an elephant! Don’t groan inwardly that that’s the metaphor I chose!)
So why fight that part?
You are in charge of what happens after you have the thought, and after the feeling arises. You’re in charge of how you interpret them, and what you’re going to do about them. ACT may not reduce the amount of anxiety you feel, but it will reduce how much you suffer from that anxiety.
Treatment for anxiety can include:
- Learning a new vocabulary for identifying and communicating your needs
- Learning how to recognize when your brain has latched onto an unworkable strategy
- Practicing engagement in the present moment
- Separating your sense of self from your anxious thoughts
- Creating a practice of self-care and self-compassion
- Developing willingness to experiences the consequences of taking the actions you need for the life you want
If your anxiety shows up primarily in your relationship, then couples therapy may be the right modality to get you relief. Often, anxiety is the result of patterns of interactional behaviors. Old hurts, historical events where your needs weren’t met or your trust was broken. Healing those wounds, and learning how to take up the appropriate amount of space in your relationship (yes, I will probably push you to take up MORE room, not less) can help change how your brain experiences your relationship.
The first noticeable sign of relationship anxiety is often anger: What is Relational Anger?