Anxiety is a normal emotion that everyone experiences at times. It’s a feeling of unease, worry, or fear that can be triggered by a variety of situations, such as public speaking, job interviews, or social events. However, when anxiety becomes excessive, prolonged, and begins to interfere with daily life, it can be considered an anxiety disorder. Yet having an anxiety disorder doesn’t mean there is something wrong with ‘you’. It just means that a certain amount of stress has ‘built up’ in your nervous system and has got ‘stuck’.
From a scientific perspective, anxiety disorders are caused by the brain’s fight or flight centers being switched on all (or most) of the time. This leaves us in a state of what is called ‘hyper-vigilance’. Hyper-vigilance is caused by a structure deep inside the brain called your amygdala, being switched on all the time; as if the environment isn’t safe. This is a learned behavior on the part of the amygdala, which is part of the brain’s limbic system.
Almost all anxiety disorders are caused by our amygdala’s reaction to ALE’s or ‘Adverse Life Experiences’. This includes full blown trauma, and trauma with a small ‘t’. These are all the difficult things we go through in life, many of which often exceed our ability to cope. Anxiety is the nervous system’s response to being ‘overloaded’ or traumatized by one or more ALE’s. Learning to process and make sense of the difficult things we have been through in our lives is the best way to approach anxiety. We may be born with a natural tendency towards feeling anxious when things go wrong, but that doesn’t mean we have to live our whole lives with high levels of anxiety.
