What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a thief. It steals your time, your attention, your happiness. It locks you in a seemingly endless cycle of sleepless nights, rumination, worry, and uncertainty. But what is it exactly? And why does our brain do this to us?

One of our brain’s key functions is anticipating and managing threats. There was a time when this largely involved constant scrutiny of nearby bushes for lions hoping for a quick meal. If our brain detected a lion, or even thought it detected a lion, the amygdala, the brain’s so-called “fear center,” flooded our bodies with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones hit our bloodstreams like jet fuel, jacking up our heart rates and respiration, making us sweat, and rushing blood to our limbs to get us ready to run or fight. And since calm and sober reasoning wasn’t all that helpful when you think you’re about to be eaten by a lion blood flow was reduced to areas in our brains involved in reasoning and judgement.

Don’t think, our brains screamed. Run!

This system of threat detection and management—basically, intense watchfulness paired with blind panic—was one of the things that made it possible for us to get this far as a species. Which is great! The problem is we’ve now fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years and our brains haven't entirely caught up to the realities of modern life. Even though the biggest threats most of us face on a day-to-day basis involve things like sales presentations, tinder dates, and Thanksgiving dinner with our in-laws, our brains still tend to treat these things like they’re lions hiding in the bushes.

But let’s not be too mad at our poor, confused brains. They do what they do because they learned long ago that playing it safe beats becoming someone’s lunch. Better to be constantly on the lookout for lions than take a chance of missing one. Better to overreact than under react. This is why so many of us spend our days consumed with worry and prone to panic, even about things we know we don’t need to panic about. Our brains are simply trying to protect us, but by making us jump at imaginary lions all day long they have left us stressed out and exhausted.

Worse still, there are some people (roughly 19% of the U.S. population in a given year) whose experience with this process is far more intense and persistent and takes an even greater toll on their lives. These people are often diagnosed with anxiety and related disorders such as social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, specific phobias, and generalized anxiety disorder. Distinct from these  disorders, but still deeply connected to anxiety and threat detection, is obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So what do you to about it? Well, that’s where treatment comes in.