Demystifying Anxiety Part 2: How does anxiety happen?

In Part 1, I mentioned a distinction between fear (the feeling or spectrum of feelings) and anxiety, which I defined as the result of certain habits and strategies related to fear. In this section, we’ll look at what that means.

A simple model of how fear works.

Fear is triggered by any event that creates a perceived sense of danger. Once fear is triggered, we sense that feeling, then react to it. We wake up in the night, smell smoke and see that our house is on fire, we run out of the house, we don’t burn to death and we feel safer now we’re out of the burning house. If we were to model this sequence of events, we might put it like this.

Trigger: Smell smoke, see a fire in your house.

Behaviour: You flee the burning house.

Reward: You don’t get burned (external), your fear is reduced (internal).

Nice and simple. Of course, life isn’t usually that simple. Several factors complicate the process of fear.

No. 1: Inaccurate perceptions.

Human beings are, in general, fairly mediocre at assessing most things without effective training. We tend to make guesses based on our biases, which we often don’t take the time to question. Our perceptions of the world are built out of our expectations from past events and social conditioning, which renders us susceptible to innacurate predictions. In addition, our brains are very bad at telling the difference between an imagined event and a real one when it comes to physiological reactions. Imagining a bad thing happening to us can cause the exact same physical response as the event actually occurring. As a result, we may fully buy into a feeling of fear that is not fully accurate to reality. To go back to our previous example, let’s say you wake up smelling smoke. You react just like before, but without actually seeing any fire, you flee the house and end up outside. This time however, there was no fire, your housemate just came home late and burned some toast making a late night snack. Now the sequence looks like this.

Trigger: Smell smoke.

Behaviour: You flee what you think is a burning house.

Reward: Your fear is reduced (internal).

Downside: You’re standing out in the cold for no reason.

Phobias and social anxiety are two excellent examples of this complicating factor. Most things that people experience phobias about aren’t nearly as dangerous as the level of fear felt around them. Truly dangerous spiders are very rare, and they kill far fewer people a year than horses, yet arachnophobia is far more common than equinophobia. So a model of the sequence of events of someone with arachnophobia encountering a harmless spider might look like this:

Trigger: See a spider on the wall of your room.

Behaviour: Flee the room with the spider in it.

Reward: You feel reduced fear because you aren’t near the spider (internal). There is no external reward in this case, as the spider was harmless.

 Similarly, people with social anxiety often struggle with the fear that they will do or say something clumsy, make a social mistake and be judged harshly for it. Ironically, studies actually show that people like others who publicly make mistakes more than people who do things perfectly. If we were to model this sequence of events, it might look like this:

Trigger: Fear saying the wrong thing in a conversation.

Behaviour: Avoid the conversation or don’t say anything.

Reward: Feel reduced fear as you feel reassured that you didn’t say the wrong thing.

Our minds are constantly making projections of risk based on a complicated mixture of past experiences, cultural messages, current sensory input and our general mental and physical state. These projections can be more or less accurate, but are almost never exactly right. In general, it is safe to assume that everyone is at least a bit wrong about everything all of the time. This includes ourselves, so when we do encounter a situation where we experience a lot of fear, it can be helpful to widen our perception of the situation and double check our assumptions.

No. 2: We assign a moral value to fear.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we are often bombarded with messaging that assigns some sort of moral value to fear. We’re either taught that we need to be fearless, to never show fear and reject the idea that we ever feel it, or that we need to both be afraid and act on our fear as if it is wholly accurate or we will be at fault for any harm that befalls us. In countries that prize acting happy at all times, any display of ‘negative’ emotion might be taken as somehow rude, or wrong. Sometimes we get given multiple conflicting messages at the same time, which makes things even more complicated.

Suddenly, your simple process of fear gets all sorts of other feelings layered on top. Shame, anger, guilt, and pride. Instead of feeling and accepting the feeling of fear, we create an unpleasant layer cake of emotions that restructure our entire lives around the feeling of fear.

No 3: Complicated and vague triggers.

One of the most common sources of fear is a feeling of uncertainty. When we either lack information or have so much information that we aren’t able to sort through it, we feel a certain level of fear, as if anything could happen. If we have also assigned a moral value to fear, we often end up in the situation where we feel fear from a complicated or vague trigger, then feel we must take action to either uncover the source or to stop the fear we’re feeling.

When we experience fear that isn’t accurate to the situation, feel the fear from an undefined source or from uncertainty itself, or we assign a moral value to the feeling of fear, we end up reacting in all sorts of ways, which leads to the big problem that creates anxiety.

We try to stop the feeling of fear.

What turns fear into anxiety is when these or other complicating factors cause us to adopt a strategy that aims to reduce the fear instead of addressing the cause of the fear. We take action to feel less fear, but do nothing to address the situation, perceptions and beliefs that led to the fear. When we do this, we reduce fear in the short term, but only expand and intensify the fear over time.

Trigger: Something causes us to feel fear.

Behaviour: We do something to reduce the fear.

Reward: We feel reduced fear in the moment.

Downside: We do nothing to address either the external situation or the internal beliefs and perceptions that lead to the fear. We never learn whether the fear was accurate. We teach ourselves that fear is unacceptable to feel. We feel just as much, if not more fear the next time the situation rolls around.

Soon, a situational fear solidifies into long term habits of anxiety. Even worse, the more we fight against the feeling of fear, the more fear itself becomes a trigger for more fear. This is a common experience when it comes to both generalised anxiety and panic attacks. Over time, the fear of a panic attack can become the trigger for having a panic attack, or we begin to fear feeling fear so much that we are almost never able to relax, because relaxing triggers a fear that anxiety might return.

In the next section, we’re going to look in depth at some of the strategies that mistakenly fight fear instead of addressing and accepting it. Then we’re going to look at strategies that are more helpful in the long term, as well as how to start the upward spiral that lifts us out of the anxiety trap.