Anxiety! Why and How Your Brain Betrays you.
Typing it with the exclamation point feels right even if it serves no grammatical purpose because isn’t that exactly how anxiety feels? Extra punctuation for no reason? Sounds exactly like anxiety.
Generally speaking anxiety can happen for a variety of reasons - but a good way to think of anxiety is as a focus on an underlying fear or a future orientation that leaves a person feeling on guard all the time or that there’s some kind of impending dread/doom. When we experience depression, it’s often a rumination on the past, whereas anxiety is nearly always the flip of that, a rumination on the future (and what can go wrong in that future).
Do you want to know what is difficult about treating anxiety? Anxiety causes most people who experience it to have a propensity to worry. Worry is our brain’s way of engaging in “action” in order to prevent the thing we are worried about. The problem is “worry” in and of itself becomes the problem. Rarely is the thing that we are worrying about prevented from happening or solved through the act of anxiously worrying about it. Unfortunately, our brain is often convinced otherwise. Worry makes people feel like they are “doing something”. When the thing the person was worried doesn’t actually happen, the person subconsciously believes the worry itself prevented the problem. It’s a negative feedback loop that can keep going until it’s very out of hand and worry is constantly present. Sometimes these loops can turn into other issues like OCD.
The antidote to worry and anxiety is usually being grounded and present. There are a lot of grounding and mindfulness techniques that can begin to counteract the fear based thinking. Even if you aren’t able to identify what the fear or worry is exactly - anytime you are experiencing anxiety, the solution is usually to begin to employ grounding techniques to help keep you in the moment. Adjacent to that solution is practicing mindfulness skills on a daily basis to being to build new neural connections that will allow you to access a sense of safety and grounding more easily. An example of this would be practicing 10 minutes of meditation daily.
The treatment for anxiety is usually a combination of mindfulness techniques and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for restructuring unhelpful thoughts, along with a possible medication intervention.
If you’re a worrier one of the most important things you can realize is you don’t HAVE to be a worrier and although you may be pre-disposed to anxiety or anxious thoughts, you can build healthier thoughts and learn effective coping techniques that will allow you to change the anxiety to a much more manageable level. Remember, the brain is very plastic and changing the way it interacts with and experiences anxiety is totally possible!