Anxiety
Anxiety can begin at any point in the lifespan.
Anxiety is a stress response that manifests in mental, emotional, and physical ways. Anxiety is often, but not always, caused by the approach of important events with high stakes that can result in success or failure. Examples are taking final exams at college, giving a big presentation at work in front of the boss, proposing marriage, buying one’s first home or starting your own business with a high interest bank loan. Anxiety, in such cases, is a natural response to the fear of making mistakes, not performing well, looking bad or being rejected.
In other cases, anxiety just shows up at a certain age and hangs around like an unwanted guest. The anxiety may consist of excessive, unreasonable, and uncontrollable worry regarding just about everything – or it may arise when you leave your house, attend social gatherings, eat food in front of others, drive on a highway or a bridge, take an elevator, get stuck in bumper-to-bumper commute traffic or see a snake, a bat, a rat, a dog or spider. Today we can add presidential elections, COVID, and the high price of gas and groceries to the list.
Prolonged anxiety can disrupt your mental, emotional, and physical functioning.
A lot of anxiety is of the “what if” sort. The core of the worry is the prediction that something bad will happen, even if the odds are strongly against it. When anxiety strikes it plunges a person into a state of edginess, restlessness, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. Physically anxiety presents in various forms, including shallow rapid chest breathing, chest tightness, heart palpitations, lightheadedness, dizziness, sweating, trembling, stomach discomfort, nausea, muscle aches, insomnia, fatigue, and weakness. The scariest manifestation of intense anxiety is a panic attack that feels deceptively like a heart attack.
In prehistoric times our ancestors only had brief episodes of anxiety when facing very real, imminent threats like encountering a saber tooth tiger. Early humans would have a short-term release of adrenalin to raise their heart and respiration rates, a release of glucose to power their muscles, a release of natural opioids to blunt pain, and a release of coagulation factors to stop massive bleeding. This prepared them to run at top speed through thorns, brambles, and branches or stay and fight to the death. During this cascade of fight-flight hormones, cortisol would be released to shut down unnecessary functions like digestion and reproduction.
Today no natural predators are wandering about trying to kill us for their next meal. Instead, we have constant, grinding stressors (many of them invisible) that wear us down. Think about commute traffic, city noise, costly rent, having to pay bills and taxes, arguing with one’s spouse or children, arguing with neighbors or doom scrolling the newspaper or social media. How about the parental stress of raising multiple children while working with no help from grandparents who live across the country? How about the stress of coping with sudden, unanticipated job layoffs? The list is endless. All of these long-term stressors woven into the fabric of our daily lives cause anxiety. Daily anxiety from garden variety stressors is now the human condition for most of us. This is accompanied by chronic over-secretion of cortisol.
Too much cortisol shrinks the parts of the brain needed for long-term memory storage and learning new facts or skills. It blunts the immune system leading to more colds, cases of flu, and infections. It makes us lose appetite and weight, experience problems with stomachache, constipation, or diarrhea, experience acne or skin rashes, develop sexual issues, and have a higher risk of heart attacks.
I will help you reduce anxiety and learn to manage it more effectively
Specific anxieties like phobias will respond to strategies which include preparing and practicing for encountering the feared situation. Progressive exposure to a feared object, situation or animal without suffering injury gradually increases tolerance and decreases fear. This can be combined with CBT to reframe how a person perceives a feared situation to make it less threatening and easier to deal with. When it comes to generalized anxiety from living in the world the best remedies involve methods of deep relaxation such as deep breathing, daily breath-focused meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, positive visioning, stretching, yoga, and physical exercise. I will teach and demonstrate these techniques and help you weave them into your everyday life.