What is Anxiety?

Feeling anxious? Most anxiety is caused by two major sources.

The biggest cause of anxiety is behavioral. The mind is trained to become anxious due to past trauma. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes your mind can overcompensate, and you are left with an anxiety disorder. For example, a child might get bitten by a dog at an early age. This could possibly lead to a behavioral anxiety towards dogs, and whenever that child (later, adult) sees a dog, he feels anxiety. After all, he doesn’t want to get bitten again, does he? This is nothing other than the body watching out for itself and preventing future injury. If, however, the anxiety takes over, and he find himself avoiding streets with dogs, or having panic attacks when he sees a dog on television, he might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

Biological anxiety is something that you’re born with, as opposed to a learned behavioral anxiety. Biological anxiety is a byproduct of the evolutionary process. Fear of heights may have given your ancestors an advantage over contemporaries with no fear of heights (if you stay away from the edge, there’s less of a danger of falling), but if it’s preventing you from scoring that promotion to the corner office on the 22nd floor, then it’s an anxiety disorder that needs to be treated. It’s not always helpful to be so scared, and your biological impulses might not always be appropriate for present day scenarios.

Anxiety in all its forms is actually meant by nature to be helpful, and to prolong your life. Nature designed anxiety and panic to be useful tools for early man’s ensured survival. Only when your mind goes overboard and overcompensates with too much anxiety does normal anxiety become an anxiety disorder that needs to be treated with anti-anxiety medication , therapy, or both.