Why do we feel anxiety and how does it become disabling?

We have all felt anxiety at some point in our lives; At the physiological level, it appears as an acceleration of the heart rate, sweating, agitation, nausea, sleep problems, among other symptoms.

But... What is it there for? What is the role it plays in our lives?

• Related article: "Neuropsychology: what is it and what is its object of study?"

The reason for anxiety

It is easier to understand how anxiety works if we understand emotions as sensors that help us understand the environment, react appropriately and function successfully. Thus, unpleasant emotions will invite us to change paths, get away from what causes them or look for the error to carry out a new learning.

On the other hand, pleasant emotions show us which way to go and what things cause us pleasure/joy, so that we can repeat them in the future; They help us learn the behaviors, thoughts and ways of life that do work for us. As we can see from this brief description of emotions, all are important for our optimal development, including anxiety.

Anxiety is an emotion as valid and useful as any of the other emotions, it acts as a defensive mechanism. warns us of danger, alerting our body, mobilizing us to respond to danger, allowing us to adapt to the situation thanks to the fact that we have all the senses focused on it and increasing our performance in those circumstances.

This anxiety is what we could call adaptive., since it makes it easier for us to adapt to the environment and bring out our full potential in certain situations of stress or danger.

The problem appears when that emotion appears without the danger itself being present, perceiving situations that are innocuous in principle as highly dangerous. This occurs when the mechanism by which it is activated is altered and begins to activate disproportionately for the situation, on occasions that do not represent a real danger to the person and even paralyze us, preventing us from being resolute and effective.

• You may be interested: "Types of Anxiety Disorders and their characteristics"

Possible causes

There are many factors that can predispose us to deregulate this mechanism. Among them are the following.

1. biological factors

These they are more related to the functioning of our nervous system and the production of certain neurotransmitters that interact in the activation of this alert system.

2. Learning factors

At birth we are a blank book and a large part of our behaviors, ways of reacting, of understanding the world and our own emotions, and even thinking, have a lot to do with what I have learned in our environment. So it makes sense that if our family tends to act anxious in any situation, we can develop the same vision of life and how to react to different stimuli.

3. Environmental factors

If I am in an environment where any conversation, behavior or situation, that can lead me to a conflict, and it is normal that the system that regulates anxiety ends up altered.

In these cases, if we have spent a long time in an environment that we perceive as dangerous, whether at the level of physical integrity such as a war or mental integrity such as a toxic relationship, it is common for the chemistry of our brain to be altered and, in addition, it keeps a great number of anxious responses that we have learned as useful after those experiences, increasing the number of times that we will perceive a reality as dangerous and act from this vision.

To do?

There are several ways to reduce anxiety when it appears, some of them I invite you to practice if you need it from home. Here are some examples you can put into practice:

• breathing techniques: these seek to reduce the rhythm of our breathing. For example, doing cycles where you take a breath in for a count of 5, hold that breath in for another 5 seconds, blow it out for a count of five again, and leave your lungs empty for another 5 seconds. This is just one of the many techniques you can do focused on the breath.
• Grounding method, focusing our attention on everything around us and removing the stimulus that causes anxiety from our focus of attention.
• Meditation.

Nevertheless, In the long term, if you suffer from anxiety in your day to day, the most effective thing is to go to therapy, where in addition to learning techniques that make it easier for you to overcome those moments in which anxiety is not adaptive, you will be able to delve into the origin of that anxiety (at what point in my life did I start to act like this, in what situations do I feel that excessive danger without being adaptive, what situations led me to perceive them in this way, etc.) learning new ways of reacting to these situations that are much more adaptive and that allow us to enjoy our day to day.

To achieve this, you can work from therapy to go little by little understanding ourselves better and favoring that this change is permanent over time.