Written By Jason Sugg
We’ve all experienced anxiety – elevated heart rate, tightness of breath, racing thoughts, a sense of both urgency and being unable to settle down, maybe other symptoms – and it’s one of the most common things we see in therapy today. It’s very uncomfortable! But what exactly is it, and why is it something that we experience sometimes?
You can think of anxiety as a kind of free-floating fear, fear without a specific object. What is happening behind the scenes is that the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system has been activated, which puts us into the widely-known state of fight or flight. So it may come with irritability (fight response) or a sense that you have to get away from whatever situation you’re currently in (flight response), as well as an increased tendency to perceive threats (there are actual physiological changes in the eyes, ears, and processing centers of the brain that tune us more into threat).
This state of anxiety is obviously quite adaptive for mammals living in the wild, where there is a constant threat of predators. In that setting anxiety represents a sense that something is off, even if you can’t quite pinpoint what it is. For us humans, our nervous systems get trained early in our lives to respond to our environments in a process known as neuroception, which trips us automatically into a sympathetic response when there is a sense of threat. Neuroception develops from a combination of innate genetic tendencies and early life experiences, and understanding the specifics of your neuroception are a staple of therapy.
Since most of us aren’t usually being hunted by tigers these days, those threats tend to come primarily from other people and from social institutions. When we’re in a stressful situation where it feels like our livelihood or well-being are potentially threatened by other people, our neuroception kicks in and throws us into a state of sympathetic anxiety. This might mean you’re facing a big work deadline, stuck in Austin traffic, talking about something uncomfortable in therapy, or even just sense a possibility of judgment.
Our rational minds can often see that these things aren’t the threat our nervous systems are perceiving them as, but our bodies still react as though they are. Hence anxiety.
Therapy for this consists of understanding at a deeper level the things that trigger your neuroceptive system to shift into the state of anxiety, techniques for settling yourself once you recognize that you’re in that state, and then using that understanding and those techniques to shift your neuroception in such a way that you are no longer triggered in the same way by the same things. It is totally possible to change this over time. If you’re ready for that journey, in Austin or Texas, and want some help with it then reach out today!
Jason Sugg
