Anxiety is an uncomfortable part of being a human being. In some measure, almost all of us experience it. We can often point to signs of anxiety in ourselves, maybe a restlessness or rumination, maybe a churning in our stomachs or sense of trying to fight off dread. Or it just may be a sense of activation that spurs us to take care of daily tasks and plan ahead.
With so many of us feeling an extra level of anxiety lately, it’s worth looking at exactly what it is before we delve further into how it operates in our brains and bodies. The Oxford Language Dictionary defines anxiety as, “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”
This describes the both the feelings of anxiety and points to the two main triggers for anxiety: imminent threat and an unknown future. As we’ll discuss, each has a different mechanism in the brain to start anxiety.
Anxiety Signals Threat or Danger
The purpose of anxiety is to prepare us mentally and physically to avoid danger, and if that’s not possible, then to face it. Anxiety’s goal is to protect us. The opposite of anxiety is feelings of safety, not necessarily calm. Anxiety and excitement can physically feel similar.
You can be excited and energized and not anxious as long as you feel safe. Calming ourselves down only works when we can also convince ourselves that we’re relatively safe.
It’s worth stressing that not all anxiety is bad and needs to be “cured.” Anxiety has saved countless lives by protecting us from harm. There are plenty of good reasons to be anxious, and it is okay to be anxious sometimes.
If the Capitol has just been breached and you’re hiding inside it, the most natural feeling in the world is anxiety. It will motivate you to keep you safe. If you have been exposed to COVID, anxiety will help you plan out your next steps to quarantine, get tested, and tell your close contacts.
Two Core Symptoms/Circuits
Neurologically speaking, the feeling we commonly call anxiety comes from two separate networks in the brain. One is called “The Fear Circuit,” and the other is the “The Worry Loop.” Since anxiety is the combination – often in different proportions – of two related but different brain circuits, it’s no wonder it’s so hard to describe. Let’s break it down.
The Fear Circuit
The Fear Circuit centers around the role of the amygdala in the brain. The amygdala is a small, primitive brain structure that is common to humans, mammals, reptiles, fish, and birds.
Evolutionarily speaking, it’s very old, and it has been doing its job as the fire alarm or smoke detector in the brain for many millions of years.
We’ll explore this further in a future post, but the Fear Circuit bypasses the thinking part of your brain when it recognizes danger.
The Fear Circuit is triggered when you face a life-and-death threat. When confronted by a bear, the amygdala registers that your life is in jeopardy and sends out the message to your brain and body to react, even before you are aware you “see” the bear.
It initiates the fight-flight-freeze response, trying to find the best course of action to ensure that you’ll survive the encounter. You don’t actually get a conscious say in which option your brain chooses. People often berate themselves for years about why they responded in a certain way, maybe freezing instead of fighting back, when you don’t get much conscious input. Your basic survival skills step in and take over.
Two of the ways we see the Fear Circuit at work when anxiety becomes dysfunctional are panic and phobia. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you’ve felt the Fear Circuit at work. The same thing happens when we develop a phobia: an overly fearful reaction to something harmless, or a fear that is well out of proportion to the threat of harm. This is the amygdala sending out a false alarm.
The Worry Loop
Sometimes with anxiety, our conscious minds are very much involved. This is when our Worry Loop is triggered. The Worry Loop is a tract of neurons, or cells in the brain, that runs in a loop between three areas of the brain.
One of those parts of the brain is the prefrontal cortex, where our higher-level thinking happens. Our thoughts, planning, and imagination are all thanks to our prefrontal cortex. So are language and empathy. When our Worry Loop gets overactivated, signals are running in a circle, bouncing like a pinball, engrossing our prefrontal cortex.
This is the kind of anxiety that is uniquely human. It’s thanks to our ability to anticipate and interpret events.
Skills worth the cost of anxiety. And there is a purpose to our worry. Our worry is there to help us plan before we act. Only when it gets out of control and we keep on worrying does it become counterproductive.
Negative bias
Part of the reason we feel overly anxious about unlikely threats is what scientists and mental health professionals call negative bias. This is where our brains play out “better safe than sorry.” We are hard-wired to overestimate danger, threat, and risk.
This is because over thousands of years of human evolution, and in the whole animal kingdom, those of us who erred on the side of caution were more likely to survive to adulthood and pass on our anxious genes.
It is safer to assume a stick is a snake and to jump back than it is to assume a snake is a stick and get bitten.
We are all descended from the anxious survivors who ran or fought, not the easy-going ones who were slow to respond to danger.
Anxiety Exists for a Reason
I will say it again: anxiety is not always a bad thing. The Fear Circuit has probably saved your life more than once, if only by keeping you from stepping out into traffic or causing you to brake quickly when the car in front of you stops. The Worry Loop helps you plan for the future and figure out the best course of action.
Much of this kind of anxiety is the arousal of being alive. It keeps us safe and proactive in the world. We will have imminent threats, and we will need to make plans to perform at our best at times. We need anxiety to do this. Complacency isn’t a very good survival strategy.
There are times when we experience ongoing high levels of anxiety. Some of the time the anxiety makes perfect sense. When there is a chronic threat to your safety, such as living with a violent person in your home, the anxiety is not dysfunctional, the situation is.
For this kind of anxiety, what’s ultimately needed is a solution to the ongoing threat. Some kind of intervention or change of environment is needed. It won’t hurt to learn anxiety reduction skills, but they are only going to be somewhat helpful. How would it make sense to be relaxed in a tiger’s cage?
Dysfunctional Anxiety
All of this talk about different kinds of threats and the anxiety we feel is all well and good when we can identify a real and present reason that we are anxious. But a lot of times we can’t figure out why we’re anxious, or we know that our anxiety is out of proportion to the actual threat.
When it starts to mess with our ability to enjoy life, it’s time to do something about it. We call it an anxiety disorder when it starts to interfere with our ability to function.
You may be anxious to the point you are counterproductive in dealing with your stressors. Or if you can’t do your job, take care of your daily activities, socialize, or you’re spending tons of time dealing with your anxiety, it’s become dysfunctional.
Sometimes anxiety has become a way of life in adulthood. Fear and worry may have been your best chance for getting through your childhood in one piece. Now that you’re safe and there’s no reason to chronically be at red alert, you’re still wired to be overly prone to anxiety. It was very functional and helpful, but now it’s not. While we need to honor the ways you managed to survive your childhood, you deserve a better present.
Stay Tuned
In the next post we’ll be exploring the Three-Part Brain. It’s a model that simplifies the brain into three major parts: the survival-focused reptilian part, the emotional and social mammalian part, and the rational human part. Understanding these three sections of our brain helps us understand how and why we feel anxiety about different things and outlines some ideas about what to do about it.