What I Wish Everyone Knew About Anxiety (From an LPC'S Desk)

I have now worked as a counselor for four years. I have seen multiple cases and a variety of levels of anxiety. The word "anxiety" is definitley a buzz word, how does one know if they really experience it or not? Where does it come from and is it really something you can manage?

I think first and foremost let's look at the Latin origin of this word. The latin word for Anxiety is "anxius" which means "uneasy, troubled". This word is derived from the Indo-European root "ank-" which means "to constrict" or "to narrow". So this indicates there's a sense of constriction, tightness, or unease. The first thing I would want people to know about anxiety is that it is felt from a bodily process through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This is the process in which the brain, the gut and the whole body are interconnected. The hypothalamus releases a hormone called corticotropin in response to stress, that then goes to the pituitary gland and it releases another hormone into the bloodstream called adrenocorticotropic, then to the adrenal gland located on the top of the kidneys. This then produces cortisol which prepares the person with a fight or flight response. Then what usually happens after someone relizes they can rest and not stress, is the parasympathetic nervous system gets started. There is a signal to the brain that someone can rest and digest and the body will physically feel a difference from the former stress response. There are some who have been in a stress response and they have prolonged the process of enabling the parasympathetic nervous system. This then leaves someone in fight or flight mode for sometimes hours, days, weeks or even years. Due to the elongated period of being in survival mode, one can experience eating issues, extreme weight loss or gain, severe depression, chest pain, difficulty in breathing, muscle tension and more.

Long story short, this does not allow the individual to have healthy bodily functions or a overall good quality of life. The narrowness, constricted and unease is felt all throughout the body, it's not just a mental or emotional issue. Therapy and medication for anxiety can be very helpful because they provide you with tools to get out of the fight or flight response and provide your body with rest.

Often times it's easier to look at our behaviors to indicate what our emotions and thought process are actually like. Our behaviros are a window into what is actually going on deep down. Furthermore, I wish everyone knew some behaviors that indicate if one struggles with anxiety. Remember, anxiety wants to constrict, there's unease, there's uncomfortableness that's being shown. So take a momentary pause right now and invision what that would look like in a person. That would look like someone who's restless, someone who shakes their leg up and down constantly, someone who bites their nails, who is jumpy, who gets distracted easily, who seems like they're always on edge. Oftentimes, a lot of individuals who experience symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can also be naturally prone to higher anxiety. Some other behaviors that maybe don't seem as "in your face" are, someone who desires control in a situation and is insistent about it, someone who advoids another person either physically or emotionally, someone who stays in their house or avoids talking with others, someone who constantly gets angry over little things or someone who asks for reassurance in some way.

Anxiety is the precurser to a lot of maladaptive behaviors you see from someone or yourself. If you ever wonder why you keep doing that specific behavior, I would ask you "What fuels that behavior?" What are you afraid of that your body is saying "this will help make you feel better", but it doesn't end up helping after all. There's lots of people who deny they struggle with anxiety, but I would first like to see their interactions with people, how they deal with conflict, or what they do when they start to feel hard emotions. We all on some degree experience fear, so how do we process that? And if we don't, then most likely your body is processing it in other ways.

One last thing today I'll share about this is, I wish people knew that most often times than not, your anxiety is coming from something unprocessed. The words I hear when an anxious person starts to share is they are feeling "overwhelmed", "confused", "stressed" or even sometimes "nothing". That last one right there is not possible, because we as people produce emotions every single moment of our day. Even if the emotions are just contentment or safety, we are still feeling something. Anyways, all of those words above are basically umbrella words for "I am feeling so many emotions at the same time that my body and thoughts are getting jumbled and I can't seem to figure out which emotion to process here". Anxiety is not as much as just a bodily experience but more so a lack of ability to process your emotions and thoughts. You could have interpretted an event in a certain way that led you to feel all sorts of emotions that then lead to many different thoughts at one time. Now what we need to do, is learn how to decipher through them and then you can internally sort it all out and make sense of it and know what to do next. You're mind and body is like a car dashboard, things are lighting up and telling you there's something that you need to look at. If you don't, eventually the car will show dysfunction and you will not be able to drive it safely. The same concept goes for people, if you let your emotions go unprocessed and unchecked, then eventually you will start to see dysfunction in your life and you may not experience safety internally which then leads to feeling unsafety externally.

Anxiety, although at times seems really small and normal, can snowball into severe mental illnesses, severe depression, health complications, relationship complications, and the list goes on. That is why I have such a passion for this and I hope to help others grow in awareness of what this experience is like, why it's important to not let persist and why you should invest into your mental and emotional world. The more aware you are, the more in control of your own body you will be. Which is why Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning talks about a person's ability to choose their response in any given situation being the last of the human freedom's. The ability to know your mind and how to choose your attitude and reaction in every circumstance instead of letting it control you is true freedom.