What are the Causes of Anxiety?
As we go through our day, there is a part of our brain called the amygdala that gets to assess every single thing we experience, even before any higher-level-thinking parts of our brains get their hands on it.
The amygdala has the important job of deciding whether something is a threat or not–whether we need to be fearful and get ready to protect ourselves. This initial assessment occurs immediately and unconsciously, as our senses take in information about our surroundings. And that’s usually a good thing, because if we see a hungry lion coming after us or an oncoming car drifting into our lane, we need our brains and bodies to react fast!
Unfortunately, the amygdala doesn’t always know how strongly to react to the things we face in our modern daily lives, and would rather “play it safe” than ignore something that turns out to be dangerous. Therefore, there are a lot of things that get tossed into the “threat” category throughout our day, leaving us to deal with emotional and physical reactions of stress, fear, and anxiety as we handle intense workloads, negative comments from bosses, arguments with loved ones, getting cut-off in traffic, or concern about finances.
For those of us who have experienced trauma, our brains and bodies may think we are never safe anymore, and will stay in a near-constant state of alarm. For others, it might be that we tend to imagine the worst or be very hard on ourselves, perhaps because we’ve experienced a lot of unpredictability, criticism, or other sources of stress–or we may have even been born with this anxiety.
For one reason or another, our brains may have learned that we need to stay on-guard and prepare for crisis–even if that crisis is a disappointing grade on an exam rather than a hungry lion.
