Understanding Anxiety

Many psychotherapists still treat anxiety based on the theories of a 19th century Vienna physician who along with collaborator Josef Breuer proposed that anxiety arises when unconsciously repressed sexual and aggressive impulses begin to force their way into consciousness. Despite more than a century of discredit people with anxiety spend hours with therapists who futilely seek to uncover these secret urges as a means to mitigate the anxious anguish of their client. This is a sad waste of time and money.& Anxiety is a natural adaptive emotion that arises primarily from a brain module called the amygdala. This part of the brain mediates fear, aggression, and many other survival related affects. Importantly, in some people it is far more active than in others. That is, some people feel fear more intensely and pervasively than others. Indeed, there are a few people who have been documented to never experience fear or anxiety at all. And sadly, their are others who are plagued with dread or even terror with the most minor or provocations.

People with anxiety of the kind described above are bi necessarily deficient. Instead they may very well be adapted for dangerous environments in which fearfulness and the associated vigilance would enhance their survival chances. However, too much of a good (or adaptive) thing can be problematic. When someone's amygdala interprets too many events as dangers - and these events include the person's own thoughts -- then fear will be handicapping or even disabling. Such a person needs to first understand the nature of his or her fears, the circumstances in which they become worse and unique way in which they manifest. Anxiety is not always perceived as dread but can be experienced as dizziness, fatigue, irritability, and a range of other physical expressions. One reason for this is one of the many connection sites of the amygdala is the insular cortex that can link bodily sensations to emotions. An understanding of the multifaceted expressions of anxiety can act to reduce the secondary fears that often accompany it. The sufferer must then learn to identify the triggers of the the anxiety -- and this is often not readily accomplished.. Joseph LeDoux of New York University has experimentally demonstrated that there are at least two fear pathways one largely conscious and the other unconscious. Consequently, a person can experience fear or anxiety after being exposed to a thing or event that unconsciously represents danger without any awareness of the anxiety trigger.