Anxiety is a state of uneasiness, of fear, worry and apprehension that manifests itself with unpleasant and even fearful feelings when some identifiable (or unidentifiable) trigger stimulus occurs. It is an unconsciously generated emotion in response to worries or perceived threats from future facing events.
One thing that all anxiety sufferers do (whether they know it or not) is make vivid stories in their minds about all the things that could go wrong as they meet people or attend the events of their life. A good example might be asking for a pay rise from your boss – then running dozens of scenarios in your mind about all the different ways they may respond and how that will affect you.
What makes anxiety frustrating and illogical is that our common sense gets hijacked and control is passed from our conscious mind to our unconscious animal brain (limbic system) and it just does what it thinks is right for us. It responds in a very basic animal like ancestral manner – it moves us away from perceived danger and towards perceived safety. For example, if you go to work and make the speech you’ll be in danger and if you stay at home you’ll be safe.
In the majority of cases our unconscious feelings or emotional responses to danger really work well, we may glimpse from the corner of our eye a snake, so we instantly jump out of the way without even thinking, then we look back and in fact it was just a piece of hose pipe, but we were ready, just in case. We could never have reacted that fast if we had to consciously process all the required information.
Our minds do play many tricks on us and anxiety is one of them. If you think about it you get the same emotional response and anxiety symptoms from public speaking or waking up from a nightmare where you were public speaking, our unconscious nervous system can’t actually tell the difference between what is real, dreamt or just thought about in our mind.
The final part of understanding anxiety is the knowledge that your unconscious holds a kind of database of memories (metaphorically speaking), some real, some old out of date beliefs, some from dreams and some from films and it compares your anxious thoughts against this database to see if what you are potentially going to experience is good or bad. The problem is that sometimes this database gets out of sync and things that shouldn’t register as scary suddenly do, this is one way of looking at something like a phobia, which, of course, fires off anxious feelings.
Normally anxiety gradually increases over time, it’s like small things slowly accumulate until they erupt into fearful anxious episodes or even full blown panic attacks, usually the start of these can be traced back to some event or series of events that were stressful. Anxiety also heavily disrupts the depth and quality of sleep and this in itself deepens the effects of the anxiety.
After a period of suffering from anxiety, people usually become quite fearful and confused so they begin to avoid the circumstances that make them feel anxious. They don’t like this because they feel like they are failing or losing control, so they try to analyse themselves and look for answers. Sadly, they won’t find those answers because they are not in the conscious mind, they are lurking in the old animal like unconscious mind that doesn’t use language, it uses feelings and emotions.
As the anxiety gets worse the individual unknowingly begins to associate one anxious experience with another, she begins to find similarities between events, and as she tries to avoid situations that make her anxious she’ll find they start growing – being afraid of answering the phone, extends to a fear of making calls, then a fear of going to meetings etc. By this time the sufferer is now heading towards a depressive state due to fearing the fear and feeling paralysed and out of control.
Learn more about Overcoming Anxiety. My website has many free self help tools and Anxiety Hypnosis Downloads take a look.
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