What does normal anxiety look like? Normal anxiety is connected to the fight-or-flight response. In order to respond effectively in a dangerous situation, you need some kind of danger signal that gives you a few seconds to prepare to fight or flee.Having this kind of anxiety is good; evolution gave it to you for a reason. Early humans needed an alarm system that warned of impending animal attacks, or dangerous natural events, so they could respond accordingly. If you didn’t have an internal alarm system, you wouldn’t have any way of knowing if you were in a safe or dangerous situation. You wouldn’t be able to protect yourself.Can anxiety be good in non-survival contexts? Yes. There’s a continuum of situations calling for “good” anxiety. At the most extreme end are situations in which your life is at stake. At the other end are situations where you’re not in physical danger, but you feel vulnerable to being hurt, or used in some way.For example, good anxiety can help in difficult social situations. You might be with someone who is making you uncomfortable—they’re not giving you any room in the conversation, or they’re trying to convince you to do something you don’t want to do. You need some time to figure out how to set a boundary with the person, or how to exit the situation gracefully. Anxiety’s early warning signal gives you time to prepare a response, before you feel too overwhelmed to think about how to extricate yourself.When does anxiety cross over into being harmful? When anxiety becomes harmful, it works in your mind in a way that’s parallel to the way autoimmune diseases work in your body. In autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system that’s supposed to protect you becomes overactive, and starts to attack you. When anxiety becomes harmful, the system that registers danger starts telling you that all kinds of situations are dangerous, when they really aren’t.Anxiety often becomes overactive when you’ve been traumatized. If you were attacked while you were walking down the street, you can become hyper-vigilant about detecting potential attackers. You can start to feel like everyone on the street is a potential attacker. You can’t enjoy your walk because you’re in fight or flight mode, even when nothing is happening.If you grew up in an emotionally abusive home, you may have become very good at recognizing the signs that you were about to be attacked. If your dad came and stood really close to you, whenever he was about to yell at you, physical closeness might set off the same alarm years later, when your dad is nowhere nearby, and you’re with people you know are safe.Unfortunately, traumatic experiences can become a kind of template for how you respond to non-threatening situations. You feel like you have to be constantly on guard, to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen again. The physical and psychological toll of this kind of anxiety can be very great. It can seriously interfere with your ability to relax and enjoy your life.Can you unlearn a generalized anxiety response? Yes. The first step is to see that the anxiety you’re feeling in the present was originally a response to something else. Once you can identify the situations that caused your original anxiety, it’s usually easy to see how that anxiety has become generalized to include all kinds of situations that aren’t dangerous.Overgeneralized anxiety can make your feel like you’re crazy. You’re not. Your fear and worry make sense. Your anxiety is a self-protective mechanism that’s gotten out of control. Of course you wanted to protect yourself from danger; of course that meant you wanted to be able to detect dangerous situations early enough to escape them. If you’ve been suffering from severe anxiety for some time, getting to a place where it’s easier to tell the difference between safe, and unsafe, situations can take some help and some time; however, it is possible. You’ll feel much better when you don’t need to be anxious in situations that don’t demand it.Click to learn more about anxiety therapy and treatment with Dr. Jane Rubin.
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