Embracing Anxiety: From Enemy to Partner
When anxiety is making you miserable, it’s easy to see it as an enemy that must be vanquished at all costs. But brain science reveals a different story.
The Amygdala: Our Threat Detector
The brain’s main job is to keep us alive, and it does so by constantly scanning our environment for potential threats. The amygdala, a part of the limbic system, plays a vital role in this process, processing fearful stimuli and triggering our fight, flight, or freeze response when it perceives danger.
Wired for Fear
Though we rarely encounter life-threatening dangers today, our brain sometimes acts as if we do. This is because we are wired for fear due to our evolutionary history. Some of us have a hypervigilant amygdala, making us more prone to anxiety.
Anxiety in the Modern World
Anxiety exists to keep us from harm, but it can go haywire in the anxious individual. The amygdala cannot differentiate between actual life-threatening events and those that only feel life-threatening, like presenting to the board. This leads to a cascade of physical and emotional responses.
The Irrational Nature of Anxiety
The brain’s automatic response to perceived threats can make anxiety feel irrational. We may find ourselves in a constant state of slightly elevated anxiety or panic in situations that don’t warrant it.
Anxiety as a Partner
Anxiety’s purpose is to keep us safe, so it is not our enemy. By remembering this, we can start working with our anxiety instead of fighting against it. When we can put distance between ourselves and our anxiety, we can treat it more calmly, acknowledge its protective nature, and examine what set it off.
Learning to Live with Anxiety
Adopting a collaborative approach with anxiety takes time, but neuroplasticity means that we can form new neural connections based on our choices, actions, and behaviors. This enables us to change, improve, and learn new coping skills to manage anxiety better.
Embracing anxiety as a partner rather than an enemy can help us understand its protective nature and work with it to improve our lives. As we harness our overachiever tendencies, we can excel at learning new coping skills and make anxiety more manageable.
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