Exploring Anxiety: Understanding Anxiety as a Complex Emotion

Roamers Therapy I August 2024

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Anxiety is an emotion that is experienced due to thoughts of future outcomes that could happen at some time in the future. Anxiety is classified as a secondary emotion, which means to feel anxious, we process information in accordance with our previous experience. For Instance, a student might feel anxious during a school presentation because they fear they might forget what they say or be judged negatively by others. As you may have noticed, we mentioned another emotion, “fear,” in our example. Emotions like anxiety are generally named secondary because they are often rooted in primary emotions that are universal, like fear. The difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is related to what will happen in the future (what will or will not occur). In contrast, fear is most likely about what is happening in the present. Going back to our example, this anxiety the student experiences does not actually come from nowhere. It is built on past experiences where they might feel embarrassed or uncertain about the result. Our brains retrieve long-term memories of this specific moment and anticipate a similar outcome for the new experience. As a result, even though nothing has gone wrong yet, the student feels anxious.

Triggers of Anxiety

As you may conclude from this example, anxiety aims to protect us from future dangers by evaluating past relevant experiences. These future threats can be so variable and personalized that the future itself can be a trigger. The anxiety triggers are external stimuli such as people, situations, places, thoughts, and emotions. But in general, anxiety triggers can include:

Health-related triggers: Triggers such as temporary (e.g., flu or allergies) or persistent (e.g., neurodegenerative or cardiovascular diseases)
Finance-related triggers: Triggers such as receiving a paycheck late, paying rent, or billing
Social situations-related triggers: Triggers such as attending unfamiliar social events
Relationship-related triggers: Triggers such as going on a new date or having disagreements with a partner
Life change-related triggers: Triggers, such as moving to a new city or starting a new school
Performance-related triggers: Triggers such as presentations or exams

Why does anxiety feel so unpleasant?

Even though it has the beneficial function of protecting us from future threats, most people who feel anxious define this experience as unpleasant. Anxiety can often feel like a lurking phantom, bringing with it sensations of danger, uncertainty, panic, and persistent worry. However, why does anxiety feel so unpleasant? The answer to this question is that it activates our fight-or-flight response. When anxiety is experienced, our body responds to an immediate danger, but in reality, it is only activated by thoughts or future threats rather than the present ones. This causes significant physical and also emotional discomfort. Activation of the fight-or-flight mechanism leads to physiological changes such as:

Accelerated heartbeat
Sweating
Muscle tension
Rapid breathing

For example, the student can experience a faster heartbeat or sweaty palms due to physiological symptoms that the fight-or-flight mechanism initiates to handle the present threat. Also, when evaluating a situation, the brain tends to retrieve negative long-term memories to keep itself prepared, which amplifies the anxiety. The combination of physical discomfort and retrieval of negative long-term memories and anticipated adverse outcomes makes anxiety a very unpleasant emotion. These symptoms interfere with the present and even affect the eating and sleeping routine. If anxiety interferes with our lives of this magnitude, we might get stuck in a cycle of anxiety.

The Cycle of Anxiety

The cycle of anxiety includes a set of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. These three components reinforce each other and maintain anxiety in the long term. As a result, these components intertwine and become a cycle that is hard to break. Here is an example of the cycle of anxiety:

Trigger: As mentioned, the cycle of anxiety appears with triggers so as anxiety. For example, a busy schedule at work might trigger feelings of worry and anxiety.
Thought: The trigger leads to negative thoughts. For example, negative thoughts might be, “What if I can not handle the workload?” or “What if I get fired?”
Physical Symptoms: When anxiety sets in, you might experience physical symptoms like a racing heart, sweating, and accelerated breath.
Cognitive Symptoms: In addition to the physical symptoms, you might experience cognitive symptoms such as distraction, memory problems, or slow information processing. You might also notice sweat in your palms, dizziness, and forget what you must do next.
Avoidance and Safety Behaviors: People often use avoidance or safety behaviors when triggers are not recognized or managed. Eventhough avoidance or safety behaviors seem to be functional because they provide short-term relief, they are destructive behaviors in the long term because they increase your anxiety more. For instance, ignoring work stress and procrastinating might help you get through short-term relief.
Reinforcing the Anxiety: However, this short-term relief is actually reinforcing the anxiety by implying that the situation is so dangerous that you can not handle it. This makes you more anxious when you experience a similar situation in the future. Without addressing behaviors like poor work-life balance or failing to set boundaries, the underlying issues will remain, continuing to cause stress in future situations.

How to Break Cycle of Anxiety

Building healthy coping methods is an effective alternative to avoidance or safety behaviors because it helps you address, analyze, and manage the uncomfortable or difficult feelings that can arise from anxiety. For example, if you want to manage stress at work, you could work with a therapist to improve your external boundaries with coworkers or your supervisor or set internal limits about how much time you spend on self-care outside of work.

Since everyone experiences anxiety differently and is frequently unaware of the connection between triggers, thoughts, and behavior, anxiety can be challenging to manage. Nonetheless, by comprehending the anxiety cycle, you might get a road map for effectively and healthily handling it. The cycle listed below can help you better understand your anxiety:

Determine the factors that cause you to feel anxious, distracted, overwhelmed, or extremely stressed. In our case, the trigger is the workload you have at the moment. It is more than you can handle and makes you anxious. Finding the trigger will help you explore and understand the nature of the cycle of anxiety.

Consider your approach to managing these triggers and if they ultimately benefit you (behaviorally, cognitively, emotionally, socially, mentally, and physically). Let’s closely monitor how you manage the triggers with multiple aspects of the example.
1. Mentally: Thoughts such as “What if I can not handle the workload?” or “What if I get fired?” can cause rumination, which is repetitive thoughts that interfere with other mental activities. To manage this, you can break down the workload into manageable steps and plan by prioritizing steps. Also, you can talk to your supervisor about your current workload and ask for a more applicable work schedule by dividing your workload among your coworkers.
2. Emotionally: As your rumination increases, you might feel multiple emotions, such as irritability, frustration, or anxiety. To cope with that emotion, you can work on identifying and naming the emotion you experienced. Even though you identify the anxiety, you might search for ways to process the emotion healthily, such as practicing mindfulness, thought logs, triangular journal logs, or talking with a friend. Like every experience, what will work for you for coping with anxiety is personal. Finding what will work for you might take time, but once you find suitable coping skills, it help prevent your anxiety from escalating.
3. Behaviorally: Rumination and feelings of anxiety might lead to some avoidance or safety behaviors such as procrastination, nail-biting, or stress eating. To manage your anxiety, you need to replace avoidance or safety behaviors with more adaptive ones. For instance, Rewarding yourself after completing manageable steps of your plans, such as meeting with your friends or watching your favorite show, planning more regular breaks using techniques like Pomodoro, or using a stress ball for your nail-biting.
4. Cognitively: You might experience cognitive problems such as difficulty focusing, difficulty remembering details, or difficulty making decisions. To have mental clarity, you might use checklists or phone reminders to follow your tasks or mind-mapping techniques to organize your ideas.
5. Physically: Your body might respond to anxiety with some physical symptoms, such as headaches, fatigue, or muscle tension. To manage physical symptoms, you might structure your daily habits, such as eating healthily and getting 7-8 hours of sleep. Also, adding regular exercise to your routine, even 15 minutes of walking, can reduce stress hormones and impact overall well-being.

Make an effort to learn more about effective coping mechanisms for anxiety triggers. A mental health professional may be necessary to assist you with this phase, as they can provide you with more insight into the distinctions between good and harmful responses to anxiety and how to create effective coping techniques. Some examples of common coping mechanisms are mindful meditation, thought logs, or triangular journal logs.

Graded Exposure

Graded exposure is a technique from Cognitive behavioral therapy that helps reduce anxiety and fear by systematically facing an anxiety-evolving situation. The aim is for you to expose the situation and control your emotions and thoughts in a progressive manner until your anxiety about the situation decreases. The level of anxiety is not aimed at zero but at a level that does not prevent your day-to-day function. Let’s take a look at how we can apply graded exposure:

Identify the Anxiety Trigger: For instance, public speaking might cause anxiety and lead you to avoid school projects or different job opportunities. To continue our example in the beginning, you need to make a presentation that makes you anxious, and you are skipping that class on purpose.
Create a Hierarchy: You might start by creating a list of what makes you anxious least to most. For the list, you can rate each level in terms of anxiety from 0-10 and sort the lowest rate to the highest rate. For example, preparing your speech might be level 1, and rehearsing it in front of a mirror might be level 2. Speaking up within an informal meeting of close friends would be level 3. You can list reading it to your colleague as a Level 4. Your final level might be giving a speech in front of a formal audience with more attendees. You can add as many steps as possible and create your anxiety hierarchy.
Start with the First Step of the Hierarchy: You might start by thinking about what you will say during the presentation. You can imagine yourself confidently speaking to the audience. You might also think about what you might improve. This will help you prepare mentally for the presentation.
Gradual Exposure: Once you mentally prepare yourself for conducting the next levels. You can write down what you have been thinking of saying and practice in front of the mirror or private to hear what it sounds like.
Move up to the hierarchy list: After practicing, you might meet with some friends with whom you are comfortable, and you can present your speech to them. They may ask some sudden questions to challenge you. Meeting with loved ones would be a great way to both reward yourself in the process and take the perspectives of others.
Practice and Repeat: You can continue practicing on higher levels or at whichever level you like until your anxiety level decreases. After exposing yourself to the practiced level, you can note the difference in your anxiety level.
Overcome the Most Anxious Situation: Once you reach the highest-ranked anxiety level, you might feel that previous practice will help you decrease anxiety because you have much more positive information in your mind to retrieve. This information will eventually make you feel ready for your meeting.

This technique will help you build confidence about the situation that makes you anxious. You can adapt it to other conditions to make it more accessible and beneficial.

The Impact of Anxiety on Mental Health

Experiencing anxiety is expected during the process of growing up, experimenting with new challenges, and exploring personal values and the purpose of existence. Even while reading this article, you might feel anxious because you are learning new information or retrieving old memories. This emotion aims to inform you about potential dangers by preventing you from them or minimizing their impact by taking essential actions.

However, sometimes anxiety can become so intense that it could make you feel like you are unable to get out of bed. You might encounter difficulties in keeping up with daily tasks like eating and sleeping, as well as taking care of personal hygiene such as bathing. Dealing with such high levels of anxiety might shock your nervous system, resulting in a heightened “fight or flight” reaction for a long time. The persistence of fight or flight symptoms for a long time may cause anxiety to qualify as a disorder.

In order for anxiety to qualify as a disorder, the reaction to the trigger should be disproportional in terms of intensity or duration. It should happen often and impact the individual’s work or social life. Anxiety disorders are not the same as regular stress and anxiety, as they involve consistent, heightened feelings of extreme fear and worry. Symptoms of anxiety disorder may manifest as sleep disruptions, tiredness, unease, trouble focusing, inability to manage worrying, feelings of impending danger, avoidance behaviors, etc, in addition to the mentioned symptoms above in the long term. There are multiple anxiety disorders, and they vary in terms of type, intensity, triggers, and duration of the anxiety experienced. A few examples include: Generalized Anxiety Disorder (excessive and ongoing anxiety), Panic Disorder (acute fear episodes that might look like a heart attack), Social Anxiety Disorder (severe anxiety in social situations), Agoraphobia (fear episodes of thinking help or escape is unavailable) and Specific Phobias (extreme fear of a particular trigger).

According to the American Psychiatric Association, anxiety disorders impact around 30% of individuals at some point in their lives. Many individuals find it challenging to manage, but there are several treatment options available, such as treatments, medication (if needed), and lifestyle modifications. It is possible to take control of anxiety if you have the right support and assistance. Reaching out to a mental health professional to reach support might be the first step towards managing anxiety if it has become a disorder and is severely affecting your day-to-day functioning.

Take Aways

Anxiety is an emotion that often makes us uncomfortable with some significant triggers. Eventhough we are not aware of the triggers all the time, we can feel the physical symptoms in our bodies. Sometimes, it disappears after the trigger vanishes, but sometimes, we can get stuck in a cycle of anxiety by avoiding or confusing safety behavior. Those behaviors amplify the intensity of the anxiety in the long term. We can break this cycle by considering their mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical effects and applying graded exposure when necessary. On the other hand, when anxiety intensity becomes disproportional to the trigger in the long term and becomes a disorder, it might be beneficial to get professional help from a mental health expert.

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This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.

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