Anxiety is part of all of us, and without it, we would not be able to function. Anxiety is your body’s “smoke detector”. It is built into your nervous system to warn you to danger, in order to give you time to take action to protect yourself.
Imagine you wake up and hear the smoke detector shrieking away downstairs. You smell something smoky and your heart starts to race. You get up quickly, throw on a tee-shirt and head downstairs, where you find your partner, standing at the kitchen sink, quietly dropping the f-bomb, scraping the black stuff off his burned toast. You can see that the situation is under control, your house is NOT on fire, but your heart is still racing, and your thoughts are racing with it. You may even find yourself feeling angry —”why did I get woken up for burned toast?” or annoyed with yourself —”I really over-reacted to that smoke alarm, what kind of idiot am I?” Or maybe you’re worrying that your day is ruined, and you’ll be feeling this way all day.
Is your smoke detector broken? No. Is it interfering with your peaceful morning? Yes. And that is a bit like having a problem with too much anxiety and having it interfere with the life you want to live. A normal level of anxiety keeps us alert and safe from danger. Having too much anxiety is like having your smoke detector located just over your toaster. It’s reacting to things that aren’t actual danger, as if they were actual danger.
Here’s the thing, in that situation, your smoke detector did exactly what it was supposed to do: it sensed danger, in the form of smoke, and it alerted you so that you could take action. Your nervous system, with the help of normal anxiety, did exactly what it was supposed to do: it propelled you down the stairs to investigate and take care of the situation. If you have a tendency to be anxious, though, your mind may return to the memory of what startled you, like the smoke detector going off, over and over throughout the day. And from there, your mind jumps to what-if’s — what if my partner hadn’t noticed the burning toast until there were flames coming out of the toaster? what if the smoke detector wasn’t working and my whole kitchen caught on fire? what if I’d been sleeping too soundly to notice the smoke detector and there really was a fire?
Too much of a good thing
If your smoke detector goes off for every little puff of steam in the kitchen, then you need to “treat” that thing -- fix it, replace it, move it somewhere.
If your nervous system is “alerting” too often, too strongly, in response to memories, startling experiences, or persistent negative thoughts, you can learn learn to manage that nervous system response , so that you can get back into the kind of life you want to be living.
Getting your anxiety under control
Your anxiety treatment depends on what kind of anxiety is interfering with your life. Anxiety lives in two different parts of our brains: the cortex and the amygdala. Knowing this, we can target your specific kind of anxiety, in order to get it under control.
Cortex-based anxiety is the over-thinking, future-tripping, disaster-assuming, worrying kind of anxiety. We can treat it with some techniques from ACT (Acceptance and Committment Therapy) , like cognitive defusion (un-sticking from the anxious thoughts). Or we can use techniques from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ), like cognitive restructuring (challenging and changing the thoughts themselves). We start by identifying what messages your mind is giving you (sometimes called ‘automatic thoughts’ or ‘negative self-talk’) and we use various tactics to retrain your thinking and get this anxiety to quiet down, so you can get on with your life.
· Amygdala-based anxiety is the fight-flight-or-freeze reaction that develops when you've had a strongly negative experience that your mind wants to avoid at all costs. Sometimes the trigger for this amygdala-based anxiety is clear: a dog bit you once in the past, and now the sight of a dog causes you to tremble, sweat, and find the quickest path to a dog-free zone. Other times, the trigger is less clear: crowds, driving on the freeway, a sound, a smell, a certain place just makes you uncomfortable to the point that you feel you have to get out of there. We treat this kind of anxiety with techniques that focus on changing your experience of being exposed to those triggers. A lot of this involves learning about and focusing on making changes to that fight-flight-freeze response.
Whether your anxiety is cortex-based, or amygdala-based, your anxiety CAN be treated, and you CAN feel better. Working with a trained, experienced, non-judgmental therapist can help.
Call me today at 925-351-4003 to set up a free 30-minute phone consultation. If making that first phone call makes you too anxious, then send me a text, and we can set up a time for me to call you.