What is anxiety, anyway?

Our bodies were designed with a fear response to keep us safe from danger. In caveman times, this involved our bodies pumping out a load of hormones like adrenaline when faced with a threat like a bear - that ‘fight or flight’ response enabled us to run away from the danger or fight it off.

However, most of us are not facing bears or other immediate survival threats in our day to day lives, yet our brains can continue to use the same anxiety response to deal with anything that seems like a threat. When our anxiety response kicks off, that rush of hormones give us all of those unpleasant bodily sensations - feeling our hearts racing, our stomach in knots, and our hands trembling. Sometimes the response is so unpleasant that we avoid anything that triggers it - even if those things seem harmless, and anxiety begins to take over our lives. Avoidance becomes a sly friend, narrowing our lives to prevent those anxious feelings - because it FEELS like we are in danger when we start panicking.

An overactive anxiety response is like a car alarm that goes off anytime someone walks by. We probably aren’t facing immediate physical danger every time we walk into a crowded store, or speak up in a meeting at work, or any of the other situations where anxiety can bubble up.

The good news is that it’s possible to retrain your mind to not trigger that car alarm at things that are not actually dangerous to you.