Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2022. References to people still having psychological problems “today” after the pandemic lockdowns reflect 2022. This article is not medical advice. If anxiety is persistent or affects your daily life, please seek help from a doctor or mental health professional.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric disorders today. In fact, today’s world is designed to cause anxiety. But we have good news and bad news about anxiety.
The good news is that a little anxiety is healthy. Anxiety makes you more careful in the face of danger, and it can also make you hurry to finish a task before the deadline. The problem (and this is where the bad news begins) is that if you worry too much about the wrong things and keep worrying over time, anxiety stops being healthy, and we can start talking about a disorder. Fortunately, this disorder is easy to fix if we’re aware of it.
How to fight anxiety
Why does anxiety happen?
Everyone will go through episodes of anxiety in their lives, although not everyone will experience them in the same way or with the same intensity. According to research, anxiety disorder can have a certain genetic component. That is, if you have a relative with an anxiety disorder, your risk of developing anxiety is five times higher.
According to Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, our genes may control not only our baseline levels of anxiety but also our sensitivity to stressors. That’s why, faced with the same problems in life, such as a divorce or trouble at work, some people can get through those difficult times with a little anxiety but without developing an anxiety disorder.
But not everything depends on our genes. Genes really just hand us a loaded gun. Whether or not we pull the trigger depends on our thoughts and our emotional control.
According to research, people who are prone to anxiety may at some point in their lives suffer from clinical depression. In fact, it seems that both depression and anxiety arise in the same area of the brain, which is why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac (used to treat depression) have proved effective in treating anxiety disorder.
Let’s take an example
This is an example given by Sandra Aamodt, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Yale University and co-author of the book Welcome to Your Brain.
See also: The only difference between peace of mind and stress is attitude
Suppose you’re walking in the countryside and out of the corner of your eye you see a snake drop past your right shoulder. Naturally, you’re gripped by panic and feel a moment of anxiety (especially if you’re afraid of snakes). You quickly jump aside, and on a clearer look you see it wasn’t a snake but a tree branch. Most people, once they’ve seen there was no danger, go back to their normal state. They had a moment of fear, and once the danger is gone, the anxiety goes too.
This happens because the prefrontal cortex, once it has seen there’s no real danger, inhibits the amygdala, which is in charge of putting us on alert, and automatically switches off the anxiety mechanism. When this process doesn’t work properly, however, the person will keep feeling anxious long after the danger has passed. And for these people, this wouldn’t only happen when they think they’ve seen a snake, but also in everyday situations.
How to stop feeling anxious, according to neuroscience
The good news is that having occasional episodes of mild anxiety shouldn’t require professional treatment. That said, if you don’t start working on it, those episodes may grow stronger and more frequent over time.
If we start with the basics, which would be the most common approach in personal growth, the first step is to move away from the situations that cause stress in your life. This is common sense. If you have a partner who causes you anxiety (and it’s the only thing in your life that does), start by changing partners. However, if what causes you anxiety is your children, exchanging them for others isn’t an option, and we’ll have to reduce our anxiety in other ways.
Neuroscience recommends daily exercise as a way to lower our stress levels, and therefore our anxiety. A minimum of 30 minutes a day is recommended. Exercise is the best medicine for your brain. Not only does it keep stress levels low, it also keeps your mood in good shape and prevents dementia in the long run.
But the best way to stay away from anxiety is to “build” ourselves a life that’s good for our well-being.
But how can I stop feeling anxious if my own job stresses me out?
In many other cases, anxiety should be treated like a phobia, so we’ll need to tackle it from a behavioural point of view. Most phobias are treated by exposing the patient to whatever triggers the phobia.
If a person has a phobia of spiders, therapists start by showing them photos of spiders. Then videos, then a real spider, and so on, little by little, until the person with the phobia sees there’s nothing to fear. The same goes for people with a fear of heights or of enclosed spaces.
This simple behavioural therapy is often very effective on its own, and most patients stop having those phobias.
Something similar can be done with anxiety or stress in environments we can’t leave, such as work or particular moments in life. The problem is that, unlike phobias, here we need to bring about a more complex change in our brain: learning to control our emotions and thoughts. Some people find this complicated, but it’s still a way of training our brain, and the process may be slow but effective in the medium term.
We need to start seeing the reality of the situations that cause us stress. Why does the job that stresses me out not cause other people anxiety, but it does me? Clearly the problem lies in the way we manage our thoughts about work.
Sometimes it’s enough to take a deep breath and understand that whatever is causing us anxiety is just a tree branch, not a snake. Intrapersonal communication (what we tell ourselves) has an immediate effect on our brain. It isn’t our thoughts that rule our brain; it’s we who decide, through our thoughts, how we want to feel. This is emotional management, and it’s what leads some people to fall apart in the face of certain problems while others see them as part of the game of life.
As we said, learning to change the way we talk to ourselves doesn’t happen in a day. It can take weeks or months, but with patience we can make stressful situations stop causing us anxiety once we understand that there’s no real danger to trigger stress in our brain.
And of course, in the end, you shouldn’t rule out seeing a professional therapist.
Controlling emotions and thoughts to avoid stress
A simple recent event can clearly show how much control you have over your own thoughts. Following the pandemic lockdown, some people are still having psychological problems today.
Clearly, if a family was confined at home with no financial resources at all, any symptom of anxiety and stress would be more than justified, because reality is what it is. But among people living under the same lockdown conditions, where money wasn’t a problem, we can see notable differences.
Some people were already suffering from stress and anxiety after 10 days of lockdown, even though they had no financial problems of any kind. The only problem was being confined. And this is where how you manage what happens in your life comes in.
Some people accepted the situation and asked themselves what they could do. Some treated it like a holiday at home, where they would have time to watch TV series, spend more time with their family, read books or even use their free time to pick up a skill or learn something. Even if their lockdown had been extended for another three months, they wouldn’t have developed anxiety or stress.
Others simply fell apart within hours of learning they would be confined. So we’ll say it again: the same situation, different ways of thinking and acting, and therefore different results for your mental health.
Learn to master your thoughts, and you’ll start to master your life. This isn’t magical thinking. It’s common sense.
See also: 17 steps to get through the worst moments of your life
Featured image: Claudia Landman, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
_on_forest_path.jpg){kind=link}