What Is Anxiety?
Why You Feel Stuck in Survival Mode
If you've found yourself here, there's a good chance anxiety has become more than just feeling stressed once in a while. Maybe your mind never seems to quiet down or your body feels tense even when you mentally know there’s nothing wrong. If you've ever said to yourself, "Why can't I just stop worrying?" you might be dealing with an anxiety disorder. Understanding how anxiety disorders work is often the first step toward changing things and actually living your life again.
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety is your brain and body's natural response to spotting danger. It's designed to protect you by noticing potential threats and responding quickly if something isn't safe. In the right situations, anxiety can actually be really helpful. It keeps you alert while driving in bad weather, encourages you to prepare for a work presentation, and spurring you to respond quickly in an actual emergency.
The problem isn't feeling anxiety itself — it's when your brain begins responding to situations as though they're dangerous when they aren't actually threatening. Instead of anxiety revving up only when you truly need protection, your alarm system starts going off more often, more intensely, or for longer than necessary. You may find yourself worrying about things that haven't happened, constantly scanning for problems, or feeling physically tense even when you know everything is okay.
Anxiety isn't a sign that you're being dramatic, you’re "too sensitive," or doing something wrong. It's a normal human survival system that has become overactive. The good news is that anxiety follows predictable patterns, so it’s something you can work to understand and then respond to differently.
Why Does Anxiety Happen?
Our brains are constantly scanning our environment for potential danger. Most of the time, this happens automatically without you even realizing it. When our brains believes something could be threatening (physical danger, an uncomfortable emotion, uncertainty, or the possibility of making a mistake) it lights up your body's built-in alarm system to help protect you.
Once that alarm system turns on, your body prepares to respond. Your heart may beat faster, your breathing may change, your muscles tense up, and your mind becomes more focused on identifying and solving the possible threat. These changes aren't signs that something is wrong with you—they're signs that your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The tricky part about this is that our brain's primary job isn't to make us happy or comfortable. It’s to keep us alive. Because of that, our brains are often willing to overestimate danger if it means avoiding the possibility of missing a real threat. To boil this down: our brains would rather create a false alarm than risk failing to warn us about something important that becomes dangerous.
For people struggling with anxiety, this alarm system starts identifying danger more often than it needs to or can even realistically act on. Situations that aren't actually unsafe can begin to feel threatening, causing your brain and body to react as though protection is necessary even when you're actually safe and there’s nothing for you to do right now.
Why Does Anxiety Feel So Confusing?
One of the most frustrating parts of anxiety is that it often doesn't seem to make logical sense. You may know something is probably going to be okay, yet still feel anxious anyway. You might be able to recognize that your worry is excessive, but still feel unable to turn it off. This disconnect can leave people wondering, "If I know this isn't rational, why do I still feel this way? Why do I keep thinking about it?”
Well, that’s because anxiety isn't driven by logic alone. Our thinking brain and our emotional/survival brain don't always agree. While one part of your brain is evaluating facts, another part is asking a much simpler question: "Could this be dangerous?" If the answer is even “maybe" —even if that possibility is only based on emotional vibes — anxiety just goes ahead and treats that possibility as though it's actually a probability. And off we go on an anxious spiral!
This is one reason reassurance or trying to "just think positively” or “just don’t think about it” often doesn’t do a lot to disrupt with anxiety. While it may help temporarily, it usually doesn't address the part of the brain that is trying to protect you from uncertainty or what your emotional/survival brain has already labeled as “potential danger.”
The good news is that you don't have to completely get rid of anxiety to start to feel better. This isn’t a zero-sum situation. When you begin to understand more and more how anxiety works, you can learn different skills and approaches that help your brain recognize when it's responding to a false alarm instead of real danger. Being able to differentiate which one is happening makes it easier for your to choose how to respond intentionally, instead of letting anxiety make knee-jerk decisions for you.
What Does Anxiety Feel Like?
Now that we have a better idea of how anxiety works, let’s zoom in on what it can actually feel like in everyday life. Anxiety can show up in our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, sometimes in ways we don’t always think about as being linked to anxiety.
In Your Body: racing heartbeat or tightness/pain in your chest, increasing breathing, lightheadedness (which can lead to tingling/numbness in your hands and feet), nausea, stomach cramps or diarrhea, fatigue, trouble sleeping, muscle cramping or pain (that jaw pain could be from anxious clenching), feeling restless or “on edge”
In Your Thoughts: Difficulty concentrating, your mind going “blank” to screeching to a halt, ruminating (thinking about something stressful repeatedly without getting to resolution), catastrophizing (worst-case scenario thinking), seeing the negative in everything even if they’re small things), holding yourself to increasingly higher and higher standards and rules
In Your Emotions: Worrying, irritability, overwhelm, panic, dread that won’t go away, fear, feeling a sense of doom, emotional aversion urges
In Your Behaviors: needing to leave situations quickly that make you feel anxious, beginning to avoid situations/places that bring up anxiety (including procrastinating things), asking for reassurance from those around you, beginning to check things multiple times “just in case”, withdrawing from your social life, snapping at loved ones, restlessness (could take the form of foot tapping, cleaning, inability to sit still because you feel fear when not doing these things)
Why Does Avoidance Make Anxiety Stronger?
When you experience anxiety and all the crappy things that we just listed out, it makes a lot of sense that your survival brain would say, “Yeah, let’s not do the thing that makes me feel all of that.” Which, honestly: fair. However, this actually ends up backfiring in the long term and making anxiety worse and worse the more you do this.
When you avoid a situation that has caused anxiety in the past and you now instead feel relief, your survival brain says, “Nice! We did it!” But now your survival brain starts associating avoidance with relief that it almost begins seeing avoidance as a reward…which means that the anxiety-inducing thing starts essentially becoming a punishment for not choosing avoidance. Now you have the original anxiety, plus the punishment penalty for not choosing avoidance. Every time this happens the fear of the anxiety actually ends up building and building. This ends up creating a vicious feedback loop where anxiety ends up exponentially building upon itself, and it can create other issues if not addressed.
When Does Anxiety Become an Anxiety Disorder?
The fact that you experience anxiety is not itself a reason for concern. Everybody experiences anxiety because it’s a foundational piece of the survival portion of nervous system to function as it needs to function. However, everyday anxiety can begin to formulate patterns that are severe and disruptive enough that you’ve left the realm of “run-of-the-mill everyday anxiety” to “anxiety every day, all day that runs your life”.
Normal anxious feelings start crossing into anxiety organized into a disorder when it starts impacting:
Frequency: Experiencing anxiety feelings and symptoms every day, a majority of the day. The feelings of anxiousness just always seem to be there even if there isn’t a reason why, unlike everyday anxious feelings that show up or a reason and then goes away and stays away relatively quickly.
Duration: Experiencing this for six months or longer (Yes, even if you say “I’ve always been like this!”…that is included in 6 months or longer. It being a personality trait doesn’t make this not apply)
Control: Despite all of these things being aimed at controlling your anxiety, you struggle to control the attempts to control the anxious factors
Physical toll: You feel exhausted, have to navigate pain and tension, sleep like crap, can’t really rest or stop moving
Life functioning: It gets in the way of you doing normal daily tasks, tasks that you need to be doing, and interferes in different areas of your life (in your home, work, health, social life)
What Are the Different Types of Anxiety Disorders?
There are several different types of anxiety disorders, and which one may apply depends on what our brains have learned to identify as threatening . While there can be a lot of overlap between them, each anxiety disorder tends to follow its own recognizable pattern.
Some of the most common anxiety disorders that I see in my work include:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder: This is the anxiety that we’ve generally been discussing in this article so far, and it doesn’t really discern what you feel anxious about — everything is fair game to feel anxious about. Super duper fun, because now there’s so much material for it to work with…yeah, more like a ghost that haunts you always, instead of a ghost that is tied to a specific haunted house.
Panic Disorder: When anxiety is accompanied by intense surges of physical symptoms that take the form of a “panic attack.” A major part of panic disorder focuses on fear of having another panic attack and trying to prevent it from happening again.
Social Anxiety Disorder: This is anxiety that focuses on the uncomfortable elements associated with social interactions, such as rejection, feeling embarrassed or being negatively judged by others.
Specific Phobias: This has a lot of the same physical elements as a panic attack, but the focus is on an external object or situation, such as spiders, heights, flying in an airplane/driving a car.
Agoraphobia: This also has a lot of the same symptoms as panic attacks, but it’s associated with not being able to escape/being trapped or get help if a panic attack symptoms happen. Agoraphobia specifically includes at least two experiences from these situations: open spaces, being in crowds, standing in line, leaving home alone and being in enclosed spaces.
Separation Anxiety Disorder: This is anxiety specifically focused on being away from loved ones, including what bad things could happen to them if they’re away from you or bad things happening to you if you’re away from them.
What About OCD?(brief transition to the OCD hub): Sometimes it walks and talks like anxiety, but there’s more to the situation that actually means we’re looking at Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). If someone is experiencing persistent and intense worry and it requires you to do specific things in response to the anxiety that stay consistent…compulsions may have entered the chat! Sometimes compulsions can be sneaky, so it’s not uncommon for OCD to catfish you into thinking it’s GAD. I’ll talk about this more in my in-depth article on OCD, but if you think you may be experiencing OCD it never hurts to talk to a mental health specialist that is specifically trained to assess and work with OCD. (More to come on why I put that in italics in a different post. For now, just trust me.)
Can an Anxiety Disorder Get Better?
Absolutely, positively they can get better. I’d even go so far as to say they can get significantly better. Since anxiety disorders tend to follow somewhat reliable and predictable patterns, we can learn to recognize those patterns and practice disrupting them instead of automatically responding in the ways anxiety tells us to. Working with a therapist who understands anxiety disorders can help you learn and practice these skills, and for some people, working with a mental health medication prescriber can also be an important part of treatment. Getting better does not mean you’ll never feel anxious again, but it doe mean that anxiety can become much less disruptive and have far less control over how you live your life.
How Does Therapy Help with Anxiety?
Anxiety therapy focuses on identifying the“sticky” elements that show up in your specific anxiety patterns and working through new and different ways of responding when those patterns show up until you find what works for you. A therapist gets to dive deep to help you understand, work through practicing and implementing disruptions for worry and avoidance until it begins to stick, as well as help you build enough confidence in handling uncertainty and discomfort so that you eventually don’t need to see them anymore.
There’s also usually a fun element of also working on “anxiety-inception” in therapy, meaning that a good anxiety therapist will also help you learn to now spot what is actually everyday anxiety versus now being anxious about whether this is everyday anxiety or not, so that your brain doesn’t take this new learning and trying to convince you to add anxiety about your new stepping-back-from-anxiety skills. Over time, practicing these new responses helps our brains learn that we don’t have to treat every anxiety alarm like a danger we need to solve, no matter what fun ways anxiety tries to get creative in order to go back to old patterns.
Ready to Kick Your Anxiety Disorder to the Curb?
If you saw a lot of yourself in this article, you don’t have to figure out how to change these patterns on your own. Working with a trained mental health therapist who specializes in anxiety disorders can help get relief faster than many people can do on their own. If you’re located in Washington State, where I’m licensed to provide therapy, I’d also love to see if we might be a good fit to work together. You can reach out to schedule a therapy inquiry call here: