Explaining Anxiety... Without "Anxiety"

When we give ourselves a tremendous fright, or are victims of a very intense threat, we all understand that the body experiences, "Corporalize" a series of sensations, not less unpleasant known: hyperventilation, palpitations, sweating, trembling, etc.

In these cases the fear is instantaneous, but not "irrational." The mind connects all those unpleasant sensations with something "real" that has happened and we know that, with a little time, the body will end up regulating itself, that is, the sensations pass.

Then the psychologists will explain more technically that when faced with the threat of danger, the limbic system, responsible for the management of emotions (and fear is one of the basic emotions in the human being) will cut communication with the cortex temporarily and activate the path of the cortisol, hormone that regulates the reaction to stress, which will generate adrenaline and norepinephrine production, the heart will increase the rate of your heartbeat suddenly to have more blood and the respiratory system will increase its rate by hyperventilating to increase the production of oxygen, both necessary for the response "fly or fight", fight or flight, typical of a moment of threat or danger.

What's more, as many responses will also be triggered in this fight or flight process: the blood will concentrate in specific areas, leaving others less watered down, with the consequent sensation of numbness, chills, sweat, etc... The pupils will dilate to have a peripheral vision... in short, a wide variety of physiological responses essential for the act of "fight or flight" always present in a scene of afraid.

• Related article: "My 'I' as a consequence and cause of my suffering"

The dynamics of anxiety

So far, we all understand and nobody calls “anxiety” the activation of unpleasant sensations that in another context we do call “anxiety”, getting to overflow and terrify us. Why is the activation of our nervous system, necessary as we have seen in a moment of danger / fear, apparently "pathological" in other contexts?

What happens when these sensations: palpitations, suffocation, chills, sweat, trembling, dizziness... appear when one least expects it? At home sitting on the couch, in class, at work, when crossing a bridge ...

Sometimes, the trigger for activation is the connection of the place, the person or the event, with previous traumatic experiences in our life. That is, if I have suffered mobbing or bullying and it has generated anxiety, the mere fact of returning one day to the place where I experienced it or to a place that reminds me of it, may encourage the limbic system to trigger cortisol, thus initiating the response to dangerous situations, as if the traumatic event were happening again Really. This, although with more difficulty, is also in a certain way capable of being understood with a certain normality by our rational mind.

But there are many, many occasions when the above sensations appear without an apparent trigger, neither current nor remote in time. They just appear in an unexpected way, and on these occasions without knowing why we feel that our hearts are racing, that we are short of breath, that we sweat profusely or tremble uncontrollably.

In these very, very common cases, the mind goes into a panic. Panic at sensations that we cannot control and to which we cannot attribute an origin or a specific duration, and when the mind loses the ability to control and understand what lives in the body, it panics.

And of course, panic in this case is not the response to something that happens outside of us, but paradoxically, what is generating panic and fear are the body's own reactions of panic and fear, as we have described beginning.

They are the same sensations, only now we do not know the cause or why and we cannot control them, and in seeing to let them happen and pass, (as we do in cases in which something external to us generates fear in a specific way), they overwhelm us, terrifying us, and we start an endless chain in which the fear of the reactions of fear, only increases the intensity of those sensations, trapping us in a vicious circle of fear, more sensations, more fear, more sensations... until reaching the crisis, the panic attack, which in its paroxysm, at the extreme of its intensity, will end up depleting the energy of the system and we will fall asleep.

This paroxysm usually does not last more than a few minutes, but it is terrifying and sometimes ends in a hospital emergency.

Why does this occur?

Let's imagine that we are in a life time of intense personal, work or emotional stress, and imagine also that our quality of sleep is broken. This will cause our system to remain on alert / alarm for much longer than usual and also not to produce adequate rest. It is as if we carried the engine of our over-revved brain and we never had time to take it to the workshop (rest).

Eventually the system will drain, the battery will drain, and that is when the body (our own nervous system) activates the survival response that will trigger sensations very similar to those we feel in a moment of alert / fear.

That is, it is as if our system had a safety relay, a threshold, from which it "warns" us by means of unpleasant physiological sensations that we have entered the risk zone, that the energies of our system are being depleted and that, therefore, we need a long and deserved rest. In this case, the feelings of anxiety or fear are not the product of a specific and easily identifiable fact, but rather of the breakdown of the system due to exhaustion.

If we understand this, the response should be the same as when we are given a tremendous scare, we should let the system settle and settle down again. That is why at Vitaliza we attach great importance to this psycho-education, to this understanding that what is happening, which, although surprising, overwhelming and terrifying, is still "normal", that is, it has an origin and an explanation.

Once the cause is understood, we try to regulate the physiological state of anxiety as quickly and pragmatically as possible, generally through work with biofeedback, especially cardiac coherence and neurofeedback, while developing anxiety management tools such as therapeutic Mindfulness group. This, of course, without forgetting the necessary psychotherapeutic support that deepens and tries to solve the deep psychological causes that led to the breakdown of the system and the appearance of symptoms anxious.

Author: Javier Elcarte, expert psychologist in trauma, director of Vitaliza.