Your Brain on Anxiety: Assessing the Info
When we become anxious, our brains often need three things:
a sense of control
more information
a sense of safety
In my last blog post, I addressed that first need, a sense of control, which primarily aims at dealing with the physiological symptoms related to anxiety. When we become anxious, our bodies usually become activated to respond to danger. This looks like increased blood flow, rapid breathing, dilated eyes, tense muscles, among other symptoms. In order to gain a sense of control, we need to learn how to calm down our body’s automatic response to anxiety.
Gathering more information
Once you have more control over your body and more access to your executive functioning skills (or, are thinking more clearly), you can now consider the cause or reason for your anxiety. As discussed in my last post, anxiety is a response to something we view as threatening, so in this next task, we need to gain information about why we became anxious and assess what to do next.
What triggered my anxiety?
The first question we want to ask is, “What triggered my anxiety?” When we ask this question, we become curious about what triggered or prompted this feeling. A trigger could come from multiple sources; it could be a person, a place, a circumstance, a thought, or a combination of sources. Once we are able to identify our trigger(s), we can then ask ourselves a second question.
What information am I missing?
Our second question is, “What information am I missing?” Many times, our worries and anxieties are triggered when we feel we are lacking control or afraid of the unknown. We worry that someone is upset with us, or we will fail our big exam, or that we will never find love. All of these anxieties boil down to missing information. One strategy to help us deal with our anxieties is to determine what information we are missing and then ask a third and final question to see if it is possible to access any missing information.
Is it possible to gain access to this missing information?
Once we determine what information we are missing, we can ask ourselves the third and final question, “Is it possible to gain access to this missing information?” If it is possible, we can then access and process the additional information. This helps us gain a better sense of control or reduce our fears.
But sometimes we are unable to access information. If this is the case, it is helpful to accept that, in this instance, all we have control over is our own ability to manage our feelings. Regardless of our ability to access information, the ultimate goal of asking this question is to move to a place of greater acceptance in order to reduce our fears and anxieties.
A quick example: starting a new job
Here is a quick example of what this process looks like. Let’s say you recently moved and are starting a new job. It’s the night before your first day and as you are preparing for bed you suddenly become overwhelmed with anxiety.
Once you do the work to calm down your body, you move through these three questions to figure out what’s going on.
Asking yourself the first question, “What triggered my anxiety?” you determine that it is a combination of circumstance and thoughts. Tomorrow, you begin a new job in a city you’ve never lived in (circumstance) and as you get ready to go to sleep you think, “What if I get lost on the way to the office and I’m late on my first day?” (thought).
You move on to the next question and ask yourself, “what information am I missing?” You determine that the source of your anxiety comes from a fear of the unknown. You are missing a lot of information such as the typical traffic pattern of this city, the best route to take, and access to parking.
Now you begin to think through the last question, “Is it possible to gain access to this missing information?” You decide that you can search online to get an estimate of traffic in this new city and you send a quick email to your new boss about parking. This information helps you to feel more in control, but you ultimately realize that it’s impossible to access all of the missing information because your main anxiety is coming from the fear of the unknown. But with the information you do know, you feel more empowered and in control over your feelings. This allows you to more easily accept a level of uncertainty.
Empowering yourself in the face of anxiety
The goal of this second task is to empower you to know why you feel anxious and determine steps you can take to reduce that feeling. Through gathering more information, you are enabled to move into a place of acceptance. From here, we will explore the final task of finding safety.