The Nature Of Anxiety

Anxiety has all kinds of interesting effects on people's minds. Understanding what it can do can help in learning to manage it.

Anxiety exaggerates the danger of things

Everyone pretty much knows anxiety does this. A lot of the time when we're scared of something our worries are out of proportion to how dangerous that thing really is. We may have to do a mini-presentation at a staff meeting, and the anxiety could very well tell us we're going to freak out, vomit all over ourselves, and ruin our careers.

When you have a lot of anxiety it can bleed over into other areas

Someone could have a high level of anxiety because they just moved to a new city, they're not doing well in school, and their sister is sick. They have lots of things they're legitimately nervous about. However once your baseline level of anxiety goes up, it can latch on to other unrelated things and make them seem more threatening as well.

For example, that person may suddenly start worrying about getting into a horrible accident every time they drive. Even if they've never had a scary driving experience, their anxiety may have somewhat randomly glommed onto that as something else for them to be worried about.

Sometimes you'll think you're scared of one thing when you're actually afraid of something else entirely

Sometimes the thing you're truly scared of gets pushed into your subconscious and appears in a different form. It's like your mind still wants something tangible for you to fixate on, but doesn't find the first thing acceptable. Someone who's concerned about the future of their relationship but isn't fully aware they feel that way may start to worry about how safe their neighborhood is.

Anxiety compels us to avoid the things we're afraid of

The physical symptoms of anxiety are uncomfortable so this is totally understandable. The giant problem is that this is the opposite of what's in our best long-term interests. Avoidance sustains anxiety by maintaining the idea in our mind that the thing we're afraid of is a real threat. We never get the chance to see we can actually handle it. Avoidance can cause us to miss out on a lot of stuff as we rearrange our lives for the purposes of not running into the things we fear.

Sometimes people will use 'safety behaviors' to partially avoid situations. For example, someone may be nervous about attending parties, and drink a lot beforehand to calm their nerves and provide a handy excuse for any social mistakes they make ("I did that? Oh man, I was so hammered"). They're entering their feared situation, but using alcohol as a kind of armor. Another example would be someone who's afraid of needing to go to the bathroom while they're driving. They may map out all their routes ahead of time so that a public restroom is always a short distance away.

Sometimes the avoidance strategy costs us a handful of opportunities and doesn't have much of an effect beyond that. Like lots of people avoid public speaking and their lives are otherwise fine. However on occasion the avoidance approach doesn't work out quite as well. Some people end up trapped in their houses because they gradually became scared of more and more things and are now trying to avoid them all.

Anxiety compels us to do things in order to relieve it

Besides leading to avoidance, another thing anxiety can do is compel people to perform some sort of behavior to make their jitters go away. The thing is these actions never provide any lasting relief and it's not long before the anxiety is asking you to do them again. An example would be someone who tends to be insecure in all their relationships. Their anxiety may tell them, "Ask your partner if they really care about you." They do that, their partner tells them everything is okay, and they feel better for a while. It's not long before the worries reappear and they feel an urge to seek reassurance again.

Anxiety makes you think you don't want to do things that really just make you nervous

It does this in two ways. Sometimes someone will be anxious about something deep down, but they'll genuinely believe they're not interested in it. Like they may want to sign up for a certain club at school, but are a little intimidated by some of the other members. So they'll tell themselves they didn't really want to join anyways, and actually believe it.

Anxiety is also an amazing excuse and rationalization generator. Someone may realize they're nervous about doing something, but they're able to come up with an endless number of reasons why they're too busy to do it today, or how tomorrow isn't right either. For example, someone may get invited to party full of people they don't know, and decide that's the night they really, really should clean their apartment. Or maybe they'll intend to go but decide it's too cold to head out at the last second.

The excuses really are endless too. If someone dismisses five of them, a bunch more will just appear in their place. So trying to combat the excuses themselves doesn't really help. You need to tackle the anxiety that's creating them in a more direct manner.

Anxiety is sometimes brought on by unrelated physical sensations

When we're experiencing a mood we have certain thoughts, and we also feel particular sensations in our body. What's interesting is that if we can bring on the sensations associated with a particular mood for other reasons, our mind will often actually make us feel that way. If you force yourself to smile you can't help but feel a little happier. If you clench your jaw and fists and start breathing though your nose, you'll start to feel angry. Your thoughts will start to jump to things that annoy you.

With anxiety someone may do something to make themselves shaky or cause their stomach to feel a little upset. Their mind then does the next step and causes a bunch of worries to pop into their head. For example, someone may be sitting at work in the morning when they start to get nervous about their weekend plans out of the blue. If they were to go back and break down what led up to this, they would see that they had a bit too much coffee when they arrived at the office that day, and it's starting to kick in. Before they were even conscious of the physical sensations the caffeine brought on, their brain decided it was a sign that that they should feel anxious.