Anxiety- Adaptive or Disorder?

Let’s talk about anxiety. With 40 million adults in the United States alone experiencing clinical levels of anxiety (adaa.org ), it’s interesting how much the general public does not know about it.

Anxiety has been painted as an evil experience that robs those who suffer from it from living a full life. And while it’s not a secret that anxiety can run amok and certainly fill that mold, what does seem to be more of a secret is that anxiety is an adaptive trait.

Yep, that’s right. Anxiety can be adaptive. As we’ve spoken about previously, every feeling is information. Anxiety developed as a cue that danger is present and “prepares an organism to cope with the environment, playing a critical role in its survival” (Gutierrez-Garcia and Contreras 2013).

Experiencing anxiety can save your life. It creates a signal that “hey human, you’re in danger, act accordingly”. As humans, we can experience true dangerous situations and without that signal, we would be much more likely to die.

So seeing that anxiety can be useful, normal, and life-preserving. At what point does it become problematic?

Well, ask anyone that experiences clinical levels of anxiety and they may describe the experience as a “highly disabling pathological condition involving…restlessness, increased alertness, motor tension, and increased autonomic activity” (Gutierres-Garcia and Contreras 2013). There is a reason that people experiencing a panic attack often end up in the emergency room believing they’re having a heart attack.

This tends to occur when that danger cue starts to fire when there is not a true and present, life and death, dangerous situation or when a stimulus gets mis-filtered in the brain as something dangerous when it is benign.  

How might you adjust your experience of anxiety to remain in that danger-informing space rather than generalizing out to other non-dangerous experiences? There are so many ways. One of the most popular treatments for anxiety includes elements of CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy. This utilizes the thoughts, feelings, behavior triangle and works by using interventions like exposures, grounding techniques, and thought stopping (this is wayyyy over simplified) to help change the wiring of the brain in relation to anxiety provoking events and experiences. This then re-filters non-dangerous stimuli so that they do not trigger the anxiety response and paves the way so that actually dangerous stimuli get the response they need.

If you struggle with anxiety and want to talk about it further, reach out to me through the button below and let’s continue this conversation.