Anxiety results from many factors, and they can all interact. Psychologists talk about the “biopsychosocial” theory of anxiety’s origins. Put in plain English, that term means that anxiety has sources in our biology, our psychological strategies for coping with stress, and life events, including our most important human relationships.
Believe it or not, human beings developed the capacity to feel anxiety for a reason. Anxiety mobilizes us. More specifically, anxiety prepares us to fight an attacker or flee from imminent danger.
Panic and anxiety have very practical symptoms. If you found yourself in real physical danger, faster breathing, rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, and even sweating would all assist you in either fighting the danger or escaping it.
The fight-or-flight response was important in early human history—when human beings lived in packs, huddled around fires for warmth, and hunted wild animals for food. Back then, anxiety was required for sheer survival.
Today we no longer need the fight-or-flight response for this reason. Rather than hunting and gathering, most of us push stainless-steel carts through safe and well-lit grocery stores. Yet we still live with an internal alarm system that’s fine-tuned and ready for action. In the presence of a threat, we are still biologically programmed to fight or flee.
Keep in mind that the ancient humans who excelled at fighting and fleeing are the ones who survived. They passed their genes through countless generations, all the way to us. That’s why a bolt of anxiety still creates the motivation to seek protection and move toward safety.
The problem comes when anxiety turns into a perpetual series of false alarms. This occurs when anxiety happens for no apparent reason, and when it happens so often that you find it increasingly hard just to make it through the day. Sometimes, in fact, the mere thought that we are unsafe is enough to trigger the fight-or-flight response. Some of us have such thoughts more than others, meaning that our alarm system is especially sensitive. This puts us at extra risk for anxiety disorders.
Another biological source of anxiety is the structure and function of the human brain. Researchers have “mapped” the brain, uncovering specific sites that conspire to produce anxiety disorders. The main players include the amygdala and the hippocampus.
Located deep in the brain, the amygdala processes incoming signals from our five senses, interprets these signals, and alerts the rest of the brain to mobilize for fight or flight. The amygdala also stores emotional memories and is probably involved in specific anxiety disorders, such as irrational fears of dogs, spiders, or flying.1
The hippocampus is another area of the brain where memories are stored, including images of dangerous situations that we’ve experienced in the past. Some studies reveal a smaller hippocampus in people who were abused as children and in people who survived military combat. This variation in brain structure might play a role in the flashbacks experienced by people with PTSD.2
Keep in mind that some people who live through traumatic events do not develop anxiety disorders. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health indicates that the tendency to develop such disorders runs in families and is probably inherited.
Anxiety disorders can be triggered by onetime events, such as the loss of a job or the death of loved one, or they can be brought on by long-term stresses, like ongoing conflicts with a family member or workplace stress.
People can also learn to be anxious, especially if they are raised around people with anxiety disorders. As children, we naturally observe our parents and other key adults. We imitate what they say and do. When those adults develop anxiety-based thinking and behavior, we can easily jump to conclusions: that the world is not safe and that self-protection is our top priority. This feeling that the world can fall to pieces at any moment leads us to become hypervigilant—constantly on the watch for danger.
Some of our parents were perfectionists as well. No matter what we did, we could never live up to their expectations. We worried about this, and that feeling became fuel for anxiety.
Remember that some children endure physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and the unpredictable behavior of a parent who’s addicted to alcohol or other drugs. For these children, the world is literally not safe. Over time, they might try to protect themselves with strategies such as
Like other self-defeating behaviors, these strategies routinely fail to reduce anxiety.
All of us have our favorite strategies for coping with stress. Some strategies work better than others. As noted earlier in this book, many of the strategies that people use in their attempts to reduce anxiety disorders actually increase their symptoms over the long run.
This fact has an important implication—one that is easy to forget: Emotions don’t cause emotional disorders. Rather, disorders are more likely to result from our efforts to cope with emotions.
Recall the wavelike nature of emotions. They appear, rise to a peak, and then fade away. This is true even of intensely unpleasant emotions. Leave them alone, and sooner or later they will pass.
Forgetting this fact is one of the primary sources of emotional disorders. We try to stop emotions in the middle of their wave, turn them into smaller waves, or prevent them from ever surfacing in the first place. Even if this strategy works for a short time, it is likely to backfire in the long run. Emotions that we don’t allow ourselves to fully experience today tend to revisit us in the future.
To put it another way: “What we resist, persists.” If anxiety could ever be reduced to an equation, it would look something like this: fear + resistance = anxiety.