Getting to the Root of Anxiety

You are overwhelmed with worry, regularly feel on edge, and feel like you can’t stop the intrusive thoughts that are convincing you that the worst-case-scenario is definitely going to happen. It’s exhausting!

You want to be able to go about your day feeling calm and confident. You want to go to school without worrying about failing or looking stupid. You want to take care of your kids without worrying about their every move. You want to feel confident in social situations without being afraid of embarrassing yourself. But the anxiety just won’t stop, no matter what you have tried.

Maybe you have been to therapy before, and spent time talking about your anxiety, without every really understanding why you have it or where it came from. And maybe you’ve learned some tools that you were told would help you, but you’ve found that they don’t really do anything.

And as a result, you feel you’re going to be stuck worrying like this for the rest of your life.

I truly understand this, as someone who used to deal with excessive anxiety that I couldn’t shut off. However, there truly are ways to get to the root of why you’re anxious, and you really can work through it to find peace and calm in your life again (or for the first time!).

What is anxiety?

Anxiety can be described as persistent and excessive worry about one thing or many things in your life. Some common symptoms that people with anxiety experience include:

·      excessive worrying

·      intrusive and catastrophic thoughts

·      difficulty concentrating

·      fatigue

·      restlessness or feeling on edge

·      irritability

·      difficulty sleeping

You might experience physical symptoms as well, including:

·      muscle tension

·      shaking

·      sweating

·      increased heart rate

·      shortness of breath

·      nausea

·      stomachaches

·      diarrhea

You might experience general anxiety, where you worry about all sorts of different things (e.g., your kids’ safety, your partner’s happiness with you, whether you’ll be okay financially, doing a good enough job at work or school, people you love dying, etc.), or you may have anxiety just in social settings (e.g., worrying about saying the right thing, worrying about doing something stupid in front of others, fear of being rejected, etc.).

Some people experience panic attacks, where they suddenly have a significant increase in anxiety, feel out-of-control, and have intense physical symptoms, such as:

·      shortness of breath

·      chest pain

·      feeling like you’re having a heart attack

·      feeling like you’re choking

·      nausea

You may also experience anxiety about something very specific, known as specific phobias. You might get extremely anxious around spiders or snakes, or about natural disasters happening, or around blood or needles. Or maybe you’ve become terrified of mass shootings since they, tragically, have become more commonplace.

What is happening in my brain & body when I have anxiety?

Basically, when you are experiencing anxiety, your brain is interpreting that there is a threat.

There is a part of our brain called the amygdala, whose job is to constantly and unconsciously scan our environment to keep us safe. If it senses either a real or imagined threat, the alerts go off, and our nervous system shifts into a mobilized (fight or flight mode) or immobilized (freeze mode) state.

This system can be very helpful in keeping us alive when there is a real threat.

Imagine if you are walking through the woods and you come upon a bear. You want those “sirens” to go off in your brain so that you automatically shift into survival mode, and either run away, if possible, or quickly pull out that bear spray or find some other weapon to be able to fight the bear off.

If those aren’t possible, you might have to play dead (freeze mode) to be able to survive the encounter.

These responses are automatic, and we don’t have time necessarily to consciously think about what to do. You just act (or freeze) automatically to survive.

So why do I have anxiety for no reason?

So you understand why anxiety is helpful when there is a real, identifiable threat to your safety. However, you are often plagued with anxiety and worry for no reason at all. You’re going about your day and you realize that your boyfriend hasn't texted you back for an hour, and quickly you have come to the conclusion that he must have crashed his car and died.

Or maybe you’re anxious from the moment you wake up, instantly hit with a wave of anxiety about everything that you’re sure is going to go wrong today, even if there is no physical proof of it.  

So why?

There can be various contributing factors that can cause “anxiety for no reason,” including genetics, diet, certain medications, etc. However, I am a very firm believer that anxiety typically doesn’t just happen for no reason, even if some people are more genetically prone to anxiety or certain things exacerbate it.

Anxiety is usually rooted in our earlier distressing or traumatic memories.

If you experienced an obviously traumatic childhood, it might make more sense why you have anxiety in situations that trigger a past trauma response.

Or if you experienced a bad car accident, it might seem obvious why you have anxiety while riding in a car thereafter.

But if you feel like you had a good childhood with nice parents, it might be confusing why you’re always on edge.

Sometimes a lot of “little” things consistently happening add up over time.

For example, you might have anxiety around getting perfect grades in school if when you got a 89% on a difficult test, your parents often told you “Ah, you definitely could’ve gotten at least a 90%. You gotta study more next time.”

This can cause us to internalize the belief that we are not good enough, for example. And if we go through life feeling like we’re not good enough, we are more likely to experience excessive anxiety.

Imagine now you’re an adult given a project to complete at work. You still have the belief that you’re not good enough, and now you’re working on this project unknowingly afraid that no matter how much effort you put into it, it’ll never be good enough. And thus, you’re plagued with anxiety.

Why do I still worry about this stuff when I logically know it’s not true?

So you’ve gone to therapy before to work on this issue, for example, of having a lot of anxiety of failing at work. The therapist has told you to examine the evidence to try to challenge that negative belief.

You might’ve learned all the deep breathing and grounding techniques, and you tried to look at the praise you’ve received from your boss when you do well on your work projects, or that you haven’t really been criticized at work, but you still feel overwhelmed with anxiety in these situations. Even though logically, you shouldn’t have anxiety about it.

This occurs because when there is trauma (even “small” traumas), the part of your brain that detects danger get activated, and your nervous system moves into a mobilized state. When this part of the brain is activated, the frontal lobe of our brain—the part of the brain that is responsible for logical thinking, reasoning, organization—goes offline.

I often tell clients, when our trauma brain gets activated, our logical brain cannot work. So you can logically know something to be true, but still absolutely not believe it.

So what now? How do I stop the overthinking and anxiety?

In my opinion, the most effective way of addressing anxiety in most of my clients is EMDR therapy. There can be other ways to deal with anxiety, but over my many years as a therapist specializing in anxiety and trauma, I have never seen the results that I have seen with EMDR. It is really an amazing, effective treatment for anxiety (and trauma, and depression, and many other issues!).

I am a certified CBT therapist and spent years trying to help clients with anxiety using CBT. But nowadays, I rarely use CBT as it relies on the front lobe of the brain for reasoning and logic, that simply just cannot be accessed when you’re in a mobilized state. It’s just not as effective, in my experience. 

With my clients who come to me for anxiety, I take them through the EMDR treatment protocol. I work with them on bulking up their coping skills and resources (because yes, deep breathing can be effective in managing anxiety when it’s done correctly) so that working through the past will be tolerable.  

We then identify past distressing memories that are causing current symptoms, and then work through them in EMDR, one by one, until the distress is gone.

—Final Notes—

You don’t have to struggle with excessive anxiety forever. Your anxiety is rooted in something. We just have to figure out what it’s rooted in, and then work our way through it.

You will never entirely rid yourself of anxiety because it is supposed to be a helpful, human emotion that helps us stay alive.  

However, there is hope for reducing or eliminating excessive anxiety so that you can go on and live a more peaceful, confident life.

For more information about EMDR therapy, visit www.emdr.com or www.emdria.org, or you can ask me!