A lot of people come to therapy quite confused about what anxiety actually is. This confusion can explain why many people have difficulty making progress with their anxiety on their own, or even why therapy hasn’t been helpful in the past.
If you don’t know what anxiety is, it becomes very difficult to regulate it in helpful ways or to get to the bottom of why it is happening.
What Anxiety Actually Is
You might have heard people talking about how much they ruminate, worry about the future, seek reassurance, or become perfectionistic. However, none of these are actually anxiety.
Put simply, anxiety is a biophysiological response that occurs when our minds perceive that something bad is about to happen. In other words, it is a felt sense in the body urging us to escape or avoid something.
Anxiety is the tension, pins and needles, tight chest, tight neck, stomach upset, ringing in the ears, sweating, feeling hot or cold, and dizziness that you experience. It is also very important to understand the difference between an urge and an action. Anxiety makes us want to escape or avoid, but this is not the same as actually escaping or avoiding.
Why Worrying Doesn’t Help
So what are ruminating, worrying and similar behaviours? These are your mind’s efforts to regulate or get rid of the anxiety. Unfortunately, some of these efforts, such as ruminating or worrying, often lead to the anxiety getting worse or unhelpful regulation strategies becoming more habitual.
For example, imagine your pay is delayed in being transferred to your bank account. You might start by worrying about how you will pay your bills, but after a few minutes of worry you are now afraid that you will be homeless and never eat again. In this situation, the worrying has actually made the anxiety worse.
The Hunger Analogy
Another way of understanding this is to think about the difference between hunger and the act of eating. We can use hunger as a stand-in for anxiety and eating as the stand-in for worrying or ruminating. Hunger and eating are linked, but people can also be hungry without eating and eat without being hungry.
To take this a step further, it is a bit like someone saying, “Oh my goodness, my hunger is terrible, I can’t stop eating all this delicious chocolate, if only this chocolate wasn’t so delicious.” Here the person is starting to confuse their hunger with their eating behaviours and attribute their unhealthy eating to the food, rather than noticing that eating the chocolate is how they are trying to get rid of the hunger.
The hungry person wants to eat, but if we eat foods like chocolate (which is similar to worrying or ruminating) that make us want to eat more, before long our hunger and eating behaviours are even worse. In the same way, we might find ourselves worrying all the time or constantly seeking reassurance.
An alternative is to get to know the hunger, get better at accepting it, and learn to eat healthier foods to satisfy it, with the occasional chocolate on the side.
Bringing It Together
Understanding anxiety as a physical response rather than just a pattern of thoughts can make a big difference. When we recognise that worrying and ruminating are attempts to manage that discomfort, we can start to find more helpful ways to respond.
