Why does your mind race with endless “what-if” scenarios? What’s happening in your brain and body when anxiety takes hold?
Understanding anxiety starts with recognizing its meaning, causes, and effects. Mental health experts explain the science behind anxiety and reveal why your brain sometimes works against you when facing uncertainty or stress.
Keep reading to learn how to understand anxiety so you’re better equipped to handle it.
Understanding Anxiety
Once you know how to understand anxiety, you can more effectively overcome it. Let’s look at what anxiety is, what causes it, and how it affects your mental and physical health.
What Is Anxiety?
According to psychologist Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence), anxiety is chronic worrying—and while the point of worry is to help you anticipate problems, in anxiety, the worry spins out of control and you either worry about everything or nothing in particular.
Goleman says that anxiety is generally either cognitive—consisting mostly of worrying thoughts—or somatic—consisting mostly of bodily symptoms. He says that chronic anxiety tends to be fear-based (meaning you fixate on a specific situation), obsession-based (meaning you fixate on preventing certain situations), or panic-based (meaning you have panic attacks—episodes where you think you’re dying and experience symptoms similar to those of a heart attack).
In contrast, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer (Unwinding Anxiety) explains that anxiety is hard to define and that you might not even realize you’re experiencing it. That’s because it can show up with typical symptoms such as worrying, a racing heart, jittery sensations, or panic attacks—but it can also manifest as seemingly unrelated physical complaints or behavioral issues.
What Causes Anxiety?
In short, anxiety comes from focusing more on what might have happened or could happen, rather than what is happening. According to Dale Carnegie (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living), anxiety is a result of focusing outside of the present—overthinking the past and worrying about the future.
Emotional well-being specialist Nick Trenton (Stop Overthinking) clarifies that overthinking happens when you think about something so much that it harms your health. When you think about the same thing repeatedly, your thoughts eventually cease to add value or provide any solutions to the problem—they only create anxiety and stress.
Brewer adds further insight into why you might be inclined to overthink: Your brain’s designed to protect you from potential physical and psychological threats. Unfortunately, your brain attempts to protect you whether or not it has the information it needs. When you suspect a physical or psychological threat but lack adequate or accurate information about whether your fears are valid, you end up with anxiety. In other words, overthinking and anxiety occur when your brain tries to assess a threat, but, in the absence of information, it starts making things up—causing you to mull over all the possibilities, what-ifs, and worst-case scenarios you can imagine.
How Does Anxiety Affect You?
In addition to heightening fear, the anxiety that stems from overthinking negatively affects your mental and physical health in three significant ways.
Negative Effect #1: Anxiety Elevates Stress Levels
Robert Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers) explains that your body is hardwired to respond intensely to anything that triggers stress. It’s likely that your main source of stress comes from ongoing mental stressors. These anxieties stimulate your body’s stress response, and your body doesn’t distinguish between immediate physical stressors and ongoing mental stressors. It reacts to all stressors as if you’re in immediate physical danger by releasing stress hormones that provide a burst of energy and prepare your body to fight, flee, or freeze. Since mental stressors rarely put you in physical danger, you don’t burn through these stress hormones—instead, they linger in your body.
The more anxious you feel, the more you keep your body in a heightened state of stress, accumulating stress hormones that interfere with your body’s ability to regulate itself. This imbalance can disrupt many bodily systems such as your cardiovascular system, metabolism, immune system, and brain function.
Negative Effect #2: Anxiety Fuels Irrational Thoughts and Emotions
Goleman explains that anxiety-induced stress impairs rational thinking. Each time you trigger your body’s stress response, your brain prioritizes instinctual survival responses. Alongside creating a physical response, this process shuts down the parts of your brain responsible for conscious thought and problem-solving, which hinders your ability to take control of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Carnegie asserts that your anxieties create mental burdens that overwhelm you, create fatigue, and distract you from focusing productively. As a result, you become more prone to irrational thoughts that make small concerns appear more serious than they are—which in turn exacerbates your feelings of anxiety and stress.
Negative Effect #3: Anxiety Spawns Unhealthy, Stress-Inducing Habits
Because anxiety and stress feed off of each other, they often lead to two types of habits that exacerbate anxiety—unhealthy habits and avoidance.
Brewer explains that unpleasant feelings associated with anxiety elicit harmful stress-relief habits that lead to even more anxiety and stress. Relying on such habits to avoid your unpleasant feelings only adds to your existing anxieties.
Another way you might exacerbate your anxiety is by avoiding situations that make you feel anxious. Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal (The Upside of Stress) explains that avoidance creates the same effects as engaging in harmful stress-relief habits: It reinforces your current anxieties and creates new anxieties.
Exercise: Understand Your Anxiety and Strategize Solutions
Experts suggest that analyzing anxiety helps generate solutions for alleviating it. In this exercise, try pinpointing the cause of your anxiety and then explore what you can do to resolve it.
- Reflect on an issue that you’re feeling anxious about. Write down at least one thing that’s good about it. (For example, you’re anxious about driving in heavy traffic, but you can acknowledge that having a car gives you the flexibility to travel wherever you need, whenever you want.)
- Consider what improvements need to be made for you to feel better about it. Write down at least one improvement. (For example, not having to sit in traffic would improve the way you feel about driving.)
- Think about what action you’d be willing to take to improve the situation and resolve your anxiety about it. Write down at least one action. (For example, you’d be willing to take an alternative, less congested route even if it takes longer to get to where you want to go.)
- Now, think about what actions you’d be willing to stop doing to improve the situation. Write down at least one action. (For example, you’d be willing to stop constantly checking your phone for traffic updates, reducing the stress that comes with constant monitoring.)
- Finally, reflect on what might make these solutions more enjoyable. Write down as many ideas as you can think of. (For example, route planning might be more enjoyable if you turn it into a game or explore scenic alternatives, and listening to an entertaining podcast while driving might be so engaging that you don’t feel the need to check for traffic updates.)
