Understanding anxiety helps us not to fear it

Polish physicist Marie Curie once said that "we stop fearing what we have learned to understand."

This phrase reflects very well the nature of phenomena such as anxiety, whose power resides in part in its ability to get us into a very particular vicious circle: the more we try Avoid thinking about what causes us anguish or fear, the more vulnerable we feel and the more we expose ourselves to this type of concerns. The solution, then, is to give up trying to avoid any experience that makes us anxious, and instead, properly manage what makes us feel through acceptance and the desire to understand what happens in our mind. In other words: understanding anxiety helps us not to fear it.

Listen to the emotion without running away from it

If emotions exist, it is for a reason; and this is also true in the case of the emotional states that we associate with discomfort. It's true, maybe experiences like the fear or sadness are something we prefer to avoid, but that is precisely their usefulness: They motivate us to learn from our mistakes and to avoid certain experiences so as not to have to go through what has made us suffer more times.

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Also, while in the case of sadness, it makes us make gestures and sounds that help us enlist the help of others (after all, we are very social animals and we almost always live surrounded by more people), in the case of fear, this emotion makes us actively involve ourselves in looking for ways to move away from what we fear, preferably without having to depend on others (while letting them know that something is wrong through the gestures of the expensive).

Taking this into account, only a very delusional person could aspire to never feel afraid; Living life normally means exposing yourself to situations capable of intimidating us a lot, either due to dangers towards our physical integrity or by other types of more abstract threats, such as the rejection of love or a dismissal labor.

Something very similar happens with anxiety; although technically not a basic emotion, but rather a response to the emotion of fear, its existence is entirely natural, and in most cases it helps us to "get our batteries" in situations that require it. And all this without wasting time, because in many cases we cannot afford to take a few hours to reflect on what is best for us to do next.

Now, it is true that in many cases anxiety causes us unnecessary suffering. What does he do then? Well, mainly, trying to understand why we are experiencing anxiety in that problematic way, and what is the that has made a normal and useful process in most cases remain "entrenched" in our mind, without letting us advance. If, on the contrary, we fight against anxiety trying to suppress it, we will achieve the opposite effect to the desired one, because it is nourished by the frustration that we feel when realizing that we cannot control what happens to us inside or outside our minds and that, therefore, we should not lower our guard.

Anxiety is based on brain chemistry

As we have seen, both the basic emotions and the psychophysiological responses among which we find anxiety have their raison d'être in the need to develop adaptation mechanisms to the environment: it is useful for our mind to sharpen and our ability to react faster when we pick up signs of danger, and that they cease when those signs disappear (or we leave those risks behind).

This "hyper-activation" of the nervous system involves a significant expenditure of energy and causes us discomfort, but the price not to go through that can be death or be the victim of a situation that leaves us injured or worn out in some way shape. And conversely, if we remain in a state of fear or anxiety indefinitely, we may be very good at it. skiing unnecessary risks, but our physical and mental health will rapidly deteriorate and we will expose ourselves to diseases.

Thus, natural selection has meant that, over millions of years, our ancestors have developed mechanisms to maintain a certain balance in the way your mind and body work, taking into account what you perceive through what you surrounds them. The key is to maintain this harmony between what the environment demands and what the body gives to adapt to each situation; and to achieve this requires the existence of a kind of counterweight system in the brain. In this way, our nervous system simultaneously emits and captures a series of hormones that, depending on which ones they are, they make us tend more towards stress and anxiety, on the one hand, or towards relaxation and serenity, on the other.

Although there are many molecules (in this case, hormones) involved in this balance, two stand out: cortisol and oxytocin. Let's see what its effects are.

cortisol versus oxytocin

Cortisol is often calledstress hormone”: our bodies begin to produce large amounts of this molecule in situations that put us on edge. So, this hormone is one of those that activates our brain a lot, although yes, it does so at the cost of weakening other biological and psychological processes. For example, it is known that when we experience a sudden and very intense rise in cortisol, we are very prone to not generate new memories; This explains why it is common in victims of car accidents who do not remember anything of what happened despite the fact that they never lost consciousness.

The oxytocin, instead, is a substance that induces a state of relaxation and confidence in us; when it floods our nervous system, we tend to expose our vulnerabilities more to others, and to establish emotional and intimate bonds with friends, family, etc. In this sense, it is not surprising that looking into each other's eyes for several seconds in a row increases the production of this hormone. In addition, it has been seen that the more oxytocin our body produces, the more cortisol levels drop.

This is just one example of the way in which behind anxiety and stress there is a logic of search for balance: in some situations it is convenient for cortisol to gain prominence, and in others we can allow ourselves to let oxytocin win influence. Both elements are necessary, and that is why in order to adequately manage anxiety, the priority must be understand ourselves and our adaptation strategies to the challenges (real or fictitious) that appear to our step.

Are you interested in having professional psychological assistance?

If you have considered starting a therapy process for the problems caused by excessive anxiety, contact me.

My name is Natalia Bacaicoa and I am a General Health Psychologist; I can assist you in person at my center in Logroño or online by video call.