LYNX LIFE LIBRARY

Anxiety is an essential human emotion. It motivates us to attend to things we care about, to keep track of assignments, and to look both ways before we cross the street. In the right amount, anxiety keeps us functioning and helps us live safe, meaningful lives. But when anxiety is overactive, it can exaggerate in an effort to keep us safe. And even when we know our anxiety is exaggerating, we still feel anxious. Why is that, and what can we do about it? First, it can help to understand what is happening in our brain and body when we are anxious.

The Amygdala

Anxiety originates in the amygdala, which is the fear center of our brain. The amygdala is like our brain's smoke alarm; its job is to notify us of life-threatening danger and rapidly trigger our survival responses (i.e., fight or flight) so we can seek safety. When the amygdala senses a threat, it immediately initiates a survival response without running it by you first; after all, time can be of the essence in life-or-death situations. The amygdala immediately messages the brainstem to send stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, into the body to prepare to fight off or run from a threat. That awful feeling in your stomach or chest when you are anxious? That's cortisol and adrenaline! If you are truly in a life-threatening situation, this is an incredible response; you can act quickly and use the physiological effects of those hormones to get yourself to safety. However, if you are not truly in danger, you suddenly have stress hormones in your body with nowhere to go.

The Anxiety Feedback Loop

When adrenaline and cortisol dump into our bodies, we are hardwired to seek relief from that feeling as quickly as possible. When we are not in a life-threatening situation, this often involves some form of avoidance, which can provide excellent short-term relief. Unfortunately, avoidance often worsens anxiety in the long-term. This happens because the amygdala is a behavioral learner; it doesn’t learn from what we think or know, it learns from what we do. When we avoid something, we unintentionally affirm and reinforce the amygdala's exaggeration of the level of danger we are facing. The more we avoid, the more convinced our amygdala becomes that we cannot tolerate or survive that thing we are avoiding. This feedback loop increases our anxiety over time, making our amygdala more sensitive and overreactive.

Disrupting the Pattern

Not all of us experience anxiety in the same way. Your anxiety may take different forms, or be triggered by different things, and each person will need to find the strategies that work best for them. However, many studies show that exposure is key in disrupting the anxiety feedback loop. While avoidance serves as confirmation of the amygdala's initial threat response, exposure to the thing we are avoiding does the opposite. When exposure occurs consistently over time, we teach our amygdala not to fear that task to the same extent. 

If the thing we avoid is important to living a fulfilling, values-centered life, then we want to practice exposing ourselves and tolerating the discomfort of our anxiety. This is different from telling your amygdala that something is not a threat—you must remember that the amygdala only learns through experiences. When we feel social anxiety and go to the party anyway, our amygdala learns that, while we may experience uncomfortable feelings there, like awkwardness or rejection, these are survivable experiences that we have the capacity to navigate in pursuit of our goals. Over time, your amygdala will come to understand that you don’t need to have a fight/flight response at the thought of attending a social gathering.

Things to Remember

Self-compassion. When we see our anxiety as especially inaccurate, we often try to rationalize. This frequently presents as self-criticism, which can make us feel worse than we already do—why can't I just call the dentist to schedule that appointment? What is wrong with me?  While it might sound counterintuitive, offering your anxiety some compassion and validation can reduce it. This might sound like: "It makes sense that you’re freaking out, sometimes going to the dentist involves getting a shot and pain sucks. But we want clean teeth and we will survive the dentist."

Waiting it out. We know that the amygdala takes about 15 minutes to regulate back to its baseline state after it is activated, so you'll have to endure some discomfort when you practice exposure. Remind yourself that you are safe right now and that the discomfort is temporary.

Reconnecting with your values. Anxiety can become a barrier to living the life we want to live. It can be helpful to focus on your "why"—if we can practice tolerating social anxiety, we open the door to developing meaningful, fulfilling relationships.

Anxiety in Context

The world can be overwhelming and scary in a very real way, and what may be anxiety-inducing for one person will not be for another. Our experience of anxiety is not just shaped by our biology, but by our social identities, our trauma history, and the systems we are engaging with. Things like racism, transphobia, and sexism mean that systems view and treat us differently, and as such, our assessment of potential threat will be informed by who we are and what we have gone through. You are the expert of your own experience! Being able to trust your amygdala to help you stay safe is critical, and we don't want to practice exposure to things that cause us harm or truly do pose a threat. If we can develop an understanding of our anxiety and teach our amygdala to more accurately identify threats, our anxiety can shift from feeling like an enemy to feeling like a trusted, if not always entirely accurate, friend.