Anxiety is never truly going to go away. It’s part of a healthy brain to have anxiety. The whole purpose of the amygdala – the almond-shaped part of our brain – is to keep us safe from harm.
Sometimes we have an amygdala that overreacts and tells us that there’s way too much danger in the environment and that we should run away and hide under the blanket, because life is just too dangerous. Of course, that’s not always helpful.
What we are wanting to do is help calm down the anxiety enough to make sense of whether perceived threat is really dangerous, or not. The whole point of having anxiety is that it’s a signal to protect us. So if it is being a little overprotective, we can step in to say we’ve got this and reassure that part of our brain that we don’t need it to be that overprotective.
Physical & Psychological Danger:
Sometimes it can be a physical threat like standing in the middle of a busy road with loads of fast moving cars and sometimes it can be a psychological threat, like wondering if you’re going to fit in or if someone is going to think you’re weird.
The Purpose of Anxiety: Keeps Us Safe
There’s a lot of different ways that our body can layer meaning onto why we feel anxiety.
We don’t want it to ever fully go away (otherwise you would walk into a busy road without fear!) but we do want to understand whether it’s a real threat or a maybe threat. If it’s a real threat, get out of there! If it’s a not-so-real threat, can we ask ourselves to make sense of what is going on? So that we can understand where that stress and anxiety is coming from. If we don’t, it can bowl us over and make us feel that we’re out of control completely. As a reminder, we are in control. We can take a deep breath out. We can ask ourselves if it is an actual threat or if we merely perceived it is a threat.
