Anxiety: How Your Brain Assesses Danger
Emotions are the body’s way of telling us what it needs. Fear is a normal biological response meant to protect us from danger. Everyone has fears that guide decisions about what is safe and what isn’t. However, for perfectionists, our warning systems are working overtime, alerting us to danger when it doesn’t really exist. This is how we get trapped in our fears.
Fear is housed in the amygdala, the ancient, reptilian part of the brain that’s responsible for the stress response you experience when faced with danger—the urge to fight, escape from, or freeze in the face of whatever it is that stresses you out. If you’ve ever encountered a small lizard or snake in your yard, it probably froze or ran off as soon as it sensed your presence. It instinctively knows that it can’t win a fight with you, a much larger creature, so its best defense is to hold still and hope you don’t notice or to scurry under a bush to safety. In much the same way, when your brain perceives danger, it immediately must decide if the best response is to run away, freeze (or play dead), or fight. And in making this decision, the amygdala acts on instinct rather than rational thought.
The brain has a negativity bias, which means we’re more likely to think about what might go wrong than what might go right, and we’re more likely to remember negative experiences than positive ones. For example, if you watched a news story about a plane crash that killed three hundred people and a heart-warming story about a seventy-five-year-old great-grandmother finally graduating from high school, you’re more likely to remember the plane crash. The negativity bias was an evolutionary advantage that developed to help us stay alert and aware of potential dangers.
Fears, however, don’t always give us an accurate assessment of danger. Sometimes the amygdala overreacts, and we feel afraid when there is actually little or no danger. This is particularly true when you’ve experienced a trauma or an upsetting event that you perceived as overwhelming and out of your control. After such an experience, we develop a heightened sensitivity and increased fear to protect ourselves from being hurt again. The amygdala becomes like a super-sensitive smoke detector that goes off every time you burn your toast. We’re counting on it to alert us of actual danger, not something as minor as blackened toast. An overly sensitive smoke alarm, like an overly sensitive amygdala, makes it challenging to distinguish between real and perceived danger.
Sometimes our fears aren’t so much of physical harm, but of emotional harm. From a biological standpoint, situations where we might be criticized, rejected, or embarrassed feel just as dangerous as a bull charging right at us. So the fear you feel when presenting a disastrous sales report to your boss is alerting you to the danger of being criticized and embarrassed, but your brain is likely exaggerating the danger in this situation.
When we let fear drive us, we miss out on opportunities and underestimate our ability to cope with setbacks. And because fear increases if we try to ignore it, the only way to get beyond our fears is to confront them. In the next sections, we’ll work on recognizing our fears, challenging them to see if they’re warranted, and learning to cope with uncomfortable situations and feelings. We’ll do this in small chunks, so you can gradually increase your tolerance for anxiety-provoking situations.
Anxiety Tips:
Use your calm breathing before the feared event to help with anxiety: square breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, pause for 4), deep belly breathing (https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/CalmBreathing.pdf) or ground yourself using your senses and identify what you can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste in your environment. If you start to feel anxious during the event, you can step away to the bathroom and use these strategies.
Cold also helps lower your heart rate and calm anxiety. When you don’t have access to ice, you can use cold water over the veins in your inner wrist in the bathroom.
People with social anxiety tend to focus on themselves during social situations, which tends to make them feel even more anxious. When socializing with others, try to pay attention to what other people are doing or saying.
People with social anxiety disorder tend to have negative thoughts about themselves and about what will happen in social situations. If you believe that social situations are threatening or dangerous, then you are more likely to feel anxious.
However, it is important to realize that your thoughts are guesses about what will happen, not actual facts. People with social anxiety disorder tend to over-estimate the degree of danger in social situations.
It can be helpful to ask yourself whether your thoughts are based on facts and whether they are helpful. Are you having any cognitive distortions (catastrophizing, black and white thinking, should statements). If they aren’t, try and identify more accurate and helpful thoughts.
By evaluating your negative thinking, you may realize that some of the things you fear are very unlikely to actually happen, or that if something does happen it’s not as bad as you may think and that you can cope.
People with social anxiety disorder often hold some unrealistic beliefs. Common examples include: I need to be perfect to be liked. I should never make mistakes. It is important for everyone to like me. Or It’s not okay to be anxious
However, no one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. Also, it’s unrealistic to think everyone will like us - Do you like everyone? Have some people “done everything right” and you still didn’t like them? That is normal and bound to happen. Remind yourself that what others think about you is not your business. Also, anxiety is often a private experience that others don’t notice. Even if they do, it doesn’t mean that they will think less of you – Haven’t you ever seen someone else anxious? It’s normal. It’s okay to be imperfect and to feel anxious. It’s part of being human! Rather than fighting these things, try working on accepting them.
It’s normal to want to avoid situations that cause you anxiety. Avoiding feared social situations reduces anxiety in the short-term. However, avoiding social situations increases your fear in the long-term because it prevents you from learning that your feared expectations are either unlikely to actually happen or aren’t as bad as you think. Therefore, an important step in managing your social anxiety is to face the situations that you have been avoiding because of social fears. Repeatedly facing those situations reduces distress in the long-term and helps build up confidence.
Tips on effective communication: https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/EffectiveCommunication.pdf
