RECOVERY FROM PROBLEMATIC ANXIETY
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is defined as:
Anxiety is a normal and natural human response
We all encounter situations and events in or lives that create anxiety - it is a normal and natural human response when facing situations that are unusual, challenging, risky, dangerous or life threatening. Indeed, anxiety and the body’s freeze, fight or flee stress response to it is a survival instinct that has evolved over thousands of years in order to protect us. It is a series of reflexes and responses that affect our mind and body as we become prepared to avoid or deal with dangerous situations by giving us the super strength we need to fight or flee, or freeze if neither fighting nor fleeing is an option.
What are anxiety symptoms and sensations?
Anxiety (thinking or acting in an apprehensive manner) activates the body’s freeze, fight or flight stress response (electrical signals in the nervous system and hormones in the endocrine system) which produces a wide variety of symptoms and sensations ranging from seeming strange or unusual to unsettling, bewildering, distressing, disturbing and terrifying. For example, they may range from pounding heart, ‘butterflies’ and sweaty palms, to full-blown panic attacks, hyperventilation (rapid breathing that leaves you feeling breathless, light headed and experiencing buzzing, tingling and muscle spasms in the hands/feet/ears, etc.), depersonalisation (a feeling of being a detached observer of oneself), derealisation (where you feel like the external world is unreal and that you are in a dream-like state), which are particularly disturbing and distressing experiences that can make you feel like you are going 'crazy'.
Anxiety affects each person differently because each body is somewhat chemically unique. Each person will experience a different set of symptoms and sensations with varying intensity, duration and frequency. For example, one person may experience only a few minor symptoms, while another person may experience them all and to an extreme degree. Indeed, some people have a body that is much more prone to suffering anxiety more frequently and acutely. For example, research has evidenced that the Highly Sensitive Person, has a nervous system which is up to ten times more responsive to stimulus. People such as highly sensitive people usually have to learn how to live with/manage anxiety.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You should discuss the anxiety symptoms and sensations that you are experiencing with your doctor to rule out any possible underlying medical conditions. This is because there are many medical conditions that can cause anxiety-like symptoms and sensations.
What is problematic anxiety?
More than 1 in 10 people are likely to have a debilitating anxiety disorder at some stage in their life. Anxiety becomes problematic and turns in to a ‘disorder’ when our baseline level of anxiety becomes abnormally (or inappropriately) high (acute) and persistent (chronic). These acute and chronic levels of anxiety continually trigger our body’s freeze, fight or flee stress response, the symptoms and sensations of which interfere with our everyday life. At this point our level of anxiety has become out of proportion/inappropriate to the level of danger or threat we are actually facing.
There are different types of anxiety disorders – e.g. panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder. This is because different people struggle in one area more than in others.
The following behaviours are characteristic of most anxiety disorders:
Can I recover from problematic anxiety?
"Each of us has an unsuspected power to accomplish what we demand of ourselves, if we care to search for it. You are no exception…The strength to recover is within you". Dr Claire Weekes
Here I would like to introduce you to Dr Claire Weekes MBE (1903–1990), who was an Australian general practitioner and health writer. She is internationally renowned for her special understanding and successful treatment of debilitating anxiety, which at that time she referred to as ‘nervous illness.’ This special understanding was the result of her own personal experience of suffering and recovering from debilitating anxiety, starting at the age of 26 and lasting for a period of roughly two years.
She worked in Europe and America using her method of treatment to cure thousands of sufferers. Indeed, her method was so highly regarded that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1989. Before her death in 1990, she requested that her works remained readily available worldwide, and include:
Through her own experience of suffering from problematic anxiety Claire Weekes understood that, with perseverance, courage and the right guidance, anyone can recover from problematic anxiety/anxiety disorders – “that every unwelcome sensation can be banished and you can regain peace of mind and body”.
How do we get in the anxiety trap/become tricked by anxiety?
Four phases of experience can lead to us getting caught in the anxiety trap.
PHASE 1
We experience overwhelming stress as a result of one or more of the following:
There may also be hereditary/genetic factors that make us more prone to experiencing stress and anxiety than others. For example:
Stimulants and recreational drugs can also bring on anxiety symptoms and sensations. For example, excessive intake of caffeine can make someone jittery and even bring on panic attack. Cocaine, amphetamines, LSD and high doses of marijuana are also stimulants and can cause someone to experience a panic attack. Likewise, so can withdrawal from addictive drugs, alcohol, and prescription drugs, such as barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and tranquilisers.
Our nervous system can also be suddenly sensitised by the stress of some shock, such as an exhausting surgical operation, a severe hemorrhage, an accident, a difficult confinement, a debilitating illness, anemia, or too strenuous dieting (Claire Weekes).
In some cases, anxiety symptoms and sensations are the first indicators of a medical illness. If you are worried that some of your symptoms and sensations are caused by a medical issue it is really important that you have a full medical examination with your GP to put your mind at rest one way or the other.
Examples of medical problems that can be linked to anxiety include:
PHASE 2
The overwhelming stress we experience causes us to behave (think and act) apprehensively, triggering our body’s freeze, fight, flee stress response to such an extent that the symptoms and sensations we experience are so bewildering and terrifying for us that we come to fear them. The fear we feel consequently perpetuates and heightens the activation of our body’s stress response and its accompanying symptoms and sensations and thus we get trapped in the fear and stress response cycle that goes like this: stress response – fear, stress response, fear, stress response – fear, stress response - fear, stress response - fear, stress response and so on.
Rather than understanding right at the beginning that the anxiety symptoms and sensations we are experiencing are simply the symptoms and sensations of our body’s stress response and that they will eventually go when the stressor(s) that triggered them passes, or when we deploy better strategies for managing stress more effectively, allowing time for our body to recover and re-balance, we get caught in the anxiety trap/become tricked by anxiety.
"Many people are tricked... A sudden or prolonged state of stress may sensitise adrenaline-releasing nerves to produce the symptoms of stress in an exaggerated, alarming way. This state of sensitisation is well-known to doctors, but so little known to people generally that, when first experienced, it may bewilder and dupe it's victims in to becoming afraid of it. If asked to pinpoint the beginning [of problematic anxiety]… I would say that it is the moment when the sensitised person becomes afraid of the sensations produced by severe stress and so places himself in a cycle of fear-adrenaline-fear. In response to this fear, more adrenaline is released and his already sensitised body is thus stimulated to produce more and more intense sensations, which inspire more fear. This is the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle.” (Dr Claire Weekes, ‘Self-Help for Your Nerves’ (1997), page 8)
"Sufferers from these symptoms... are quite sure that there is something seriously wrong with them and cannot believe that anyone else could have such a distressing experience. Many feel convinced that they have a brain tumour (at least something 'deep seated') or that they are on the verge of madness. Their one wish is to be, as quickly as possible, the person they used to be before this 'horrible thing' happened to them. They are often not aware that their symptoms are nervous in origin and follow a well-recognised pattern shared by numerous others like themselves, the pattern of continuous fear and tension". (Dr Claire Weekes, ‘Self-help for Your Nerves’ (1997), page 11)
It is incredibly easy to get tricked/caught in the anxiety trap given that most people are not sufficiently informed about the physiology of anxiety. Even when we are informed, the actual experience of acute anxiety – its symptoms and sensations - can take us by surprise and be so bewildering, frightening and terrifying that, at the time, the only context we feel the experience warrants is a catastrophic one.
Examples of catastrophic thinking we might attach to the bewildering, frightening and terrifying symptoms and sensations of anxiety include:
Furthermore, if we experience acute anxiety and catastrophic thinking when engaging with a specific type of situation, event, person, place or thing, we might come to associate that situation, event, person, place or thing with the sense of fear we felt. This is called fear association. For example, if we experience the symptoms and sensations of a panic attack in a public place we then might associate public places with a panic attack (this is how agoraphobic develops), or if we experience the symptoms and sensations of panic attack in a car we might then associate being in a car with a panic attack.
PHASE 3
To get some level of temporary relief from the unpleasant experience of our nervous system hyperarousal, the catastrophic thinking we engaged in as a result, and the situations, event, person, place or thing we came to associate all this with, we engage in safety and avoidance behaviours. For example, we might make sure we are with someone else in a public place (safety behaviour) or avoid public places completely (avoidance behaviour). Or we might make sure we were always driving and on our own in a car (safety behaviour), or we might avoid being in a car completely (avoidance behaviour).
PHASE 4
Our continued safety and avoidance behaviours reinforce our fear of the symptoms and sensations of our body’s freeze, fight, or flee response/nervous system hyperarousal, and the situations, events, persons, places or things with which we associate them with. This is because our safety and avoidance behaviours prevent our nervous system from habituating or, in other words, becoming accustomed to those symptoms and sensations, and the situations, events, persons, places or things we associate them with, and therefore relaxing with them. Consequently, those symptoms and sensations, situations, events, persons, places or things remain novel and fearful to us, and therefore arousing and anxiety provoking. Furthermore, avoidance tends to generalise over time and this may have also been our experience – for example, we might have started to avoid using the escalator at work and then, over time, we began to avoiding all escalators, and then perhaps all buildings with escalators.
Moreover, when we avoid something that scares us, we experience a sense of failure. Thus, every time we put an avoidance or safety behaviour in to place, our fear and anxiety gains power and control, whilst we lose some. The more we do this the more we accumulate experiences of failure, which provide more and more evidence of our inability to overcome the problem. Furthermore, safety and avoidance behaviours also eliminate practice. Without practice we cannot gain mastery, and without mastery confidence is less likely to rise.
Consequently, our attempts to avoid our anxiety through safety and avoidance behaviours only serve to magnify and reinforce it to the point where it has reached the level of phobia. At this level, our nervous system hyperarousal is so high when we are faced with the situation, event, person, place or thing which we have conditioned ourselves to fear and avoid, that we lose all perspective and rational thought. We also go to such extreme lengths to persistently avoid this situation, event, person, place or thing, so much so that our fear and anxiety significantly interferes with other areas of our life – e.g., even when we are removed from the situation, event, person, place or thing, there is always an undercurrent of fear and lack of personal power/confidence/control.
© Amanda Morgan
Anxiety is defined as:
- A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome. (Oxford Dictionary)
- A state of uneasiness or tension caused by apprehension of possible future misfortune, danger, etc.; worry. (Collins English Dictionary)
Anxiety is a normal and natural human response
We all encounter situations and events in or lives that create anxiety - it is a normal and natural human response when facing situations that are unusual, challenging, risky, dangerous or life threatening. Indeed, anxiety and the body’s freeze, fight or flee stress response to it is a survival instinct that has evolved over thousands of years in order to protect us. It is a series of reflexes and responses that affect our mind and body as we become prepared to avoid or deal with dangerous situations by giving us the super strength we need to fight or flee, or freeze if neither fighting nor fleeing is an option.
What are anxiety symptoms and sensations?
Anxiety (thinking or acting in an apprehensive manner) activates the body’s freeze, fight or flight stress response (electrical signals in the nervous system and hormones in the endocrine system) which produces a wide variety of symptoms and sensations ranging from seeming strange or unusual to unsettling, bewildering, distressing, disturbing and terrifying. For example, they may range from pounding heart, ‘butterflies’ and sweaty palms, to full-blown panic attacks, hyperventilation (rapid breathing that leaves you feeling breathless, light headed and experiencing buzzing, tingling and muscle spasms in the hands/feet/ears, etc.), depersonalisation (a feeling of being a detached observer of oneself), derealisation (where you feel like the external world is unreal and that you are in a dream-like state), which are particularly disturbing and distressing experiences that can make you feel like you are going 'crazy'.
Anxiety affects each person differently because each body is somewhat chemically unique. Each person will experience a different set of symptoms and sensations with varying intensity, duration and frequency. For example, one person may experience only a few minor symptoms, while another person may experience them all and to an extreme degree. Indeed, some people have a body that is much more prone to suffering anxiety more frequently and acutely. For example, research has evidenced that the Highly Sensitive Person, has a nervous system which is up to ten times more responsive to stimulus. People such as highly sensitive people usually have to learn how to live with/manage anxiety.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You should discuss the anxiety symptoms and sensations that you are experiencing with your doctor to rule out any possible underlying medical conditions. This is because there are many medical conditions that can cause anxiety-like symptoms and sensations.
What is problematic anxiety?
More than 1 in 10 people are likely to have a debilitating anxiety disorder at some stage in their life. Anxiety becomes problematic and turns in to a ‘disorder’ when our baseline level of anxiety becomes abnormally (or inappropriately) high (acute) and persistent (chronic). These acute and chronic levels of anxiety continually trigger our body’s freeze, fight or flee stress response, the symptoms and sensations of which interfere with our everyday life. At this point our level of anxiety has become out of proportion/inappropriate to the level of danger or threat we are actually facing.
There are different types of anxiety disorders – e.g. panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder. This is because different people struggle in one area more than in others.
The following behaviours are characteristic of most anxiety disorders:
- Avoiding situations or objects that make you feel particularly anxious
- Engaging in safety behaviours to give you momentary/temporary relief within an anxiety provoking situation
- Intrusive thoughts/images/memories
- Physical hyperarousal
- Over-vigilance to danger/threat
- Over-estimation of danger/threat
- Worrying
- Low mood
Can I recover from problematic anxiety?
"Each of us has an unsuspected power to accomplish what we demand of ourselves, if we care to search for it. You are no exception…The strength to recover is within you". Dr Claire Weekes
Here I would like to introduce you to Dr Claire Weekes MBE (1903–1990), who was an Australian general practitioner and health writer. She is internationally renowned for her special understanding and successful treatment of debilitating anxiety, which at that time she referred to as ‘nervous illness.’ This special understanding was the result of her own personal experience of suffering and recovering from debilitating anxiety, starting at the age of 26 and lasting for a period of roughly two years.
She worked in Europe and America using her method of treatment to cure thousands of sufferers. Indeed, her method was so highly regarded that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1989. Before her death in 1990, she requested that her works remained readily available worldwide, and include:
- ‘Self-help for your nerves’
- ‘Essential help for your nerves’
- ‘Agoraphobia’
- ‘Pass through panic: free yourself from anxiety and fear’
- ‘Peace from nervous suffering’
Through her own experience of suffering from problematic anxiety Claire Weekes understood that, with perseverance, courage and the right guidance, anyone can recover from problematic anxiety/anxiety disorders – “that every unwelcome sensation can be banished and you can regain peace of mind and body”.
How do we get in the anxiety trap/become tricked by anxiety?
Four phases of experience can lead to us getting caught in the anxiety trap.
PHASE 1
We experience overwhelming stress as a result of one or more of the following:
- Cumulative stress over a period of time due to a succession of stressful life events. For example the Homes and Rahe Stress Inventory/Life Events Survey helps us to measure the stress load we are carrying at any particular time. If we score between 150 to 300 points on that scale in relation to what we have experienced over the last two years then research indicates we are 50% susceptible to the cumulative effects of stress. As an illustration, the death of a spouse, retirement from work, and taking a vacation would score 158; and divorce, being fired at work, a change is residence, and a major change in sleeping habits would score 156.
- A highly stressful/traumatic event/experience/significant life change.
- Growing up with one or more family members who suffered from problematic anxiety, including panic attacks, phobias, OCD, etc., resulting in us learning anxious behaviours.
- Childhood trauma/being unable to get your healthy needs met as a child and the resulting low self-esteem and its behavioural manifestations (co-dependency).
There may also be hereditary/genetic factors that make us more prone to experiencing stress and anxiety than others. For example:
- Research indicates that up to 20% of the human and animal population has a nervous system which is up to 10 times more responsive to stimulus. To find out more and to take the test to see if you are likely a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), visit: www.hsperson.com
- Some people are naturally more highly creative thinkers who can more easily escalate fear, worry and anxiety through chains of thought.
- Some research has indicated that environmental factors, such as stressful life events, may trigger an anxiety disorder more easily in people who have a genetic predisposition.
Stimulants and recreational drugs can also bring on anxiety symptoms and sensations. For example, excessive intake of caffeine can make someone jittery and even bring on panic attack. Cocaine, amphetamines, LSD and high doses of marijuana are also stimulants and can cause someone to experience a panic attack. Likewise, so can withdrawal from addictive drugs, alcohol, and prescription drugs, such as barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and tranquilisers.
Our nervous system can also be suddenly sensitised by the stress of some shock, such as an exhausting surgical operation, a severe hemorrhage, an accident, a difficult confinement, a debilitating illness, anemia, or too strenuous dieting (Claire Weekes).
In some cases, anxiety symptoms and sensations are the first indicators of a medical illness. If you are worried that some of your symptoms and sensations are caused by a medical issue it is really important that you have a full medical examination with your GP to put your mind at rest one way or the other.
Examples of medical problems that can be linked to anxiety include:
- Premenstrual syndrome (e.g. it can cause fatigue, disorientation, increased heart rate and trouble concentrating - all typical anxiety symptoms).
- Overactive thyroid (e.g. it raises your heart rate, which increases your breathing, causes you to sweat more and raises your body temperature - all of which can feel very much like a panic attack).
- Heart disease, heart failure, and heart attack (e.g. increased heart rate and breathing rate are also associated with anxiety).
- Diabetes (e.g. sugar rushes and dips associated with poorly managed diabetes can cause panic-like symptoms, such as dizziness, breathlessness, sweating, chest pain and trembling).
PHASE 2
The overwhelming stress we experience causes us to behave (think and act) apprehensively, triggering our body’s freeze, fight, flee stress response to such an extent that the symptoms and sensations we experience are so bewildering and terrifying for us that we come to fear them. The fear we feel consequently perpetuates and heightens the activation of our body’s stress response and its accompanying symptoms and sensations and thus we get trapped in the fear and stress response cycle that goes like this: stress response – fear, stress response, fear, stress response – fear, stress response - fear, stress response - fear, stress response and so on.
Rather than understanding right at the beginning that the anxiety symptoms and sensations we are experiencing are simply the symptoms and sensations of our body’s stress response and that they will eventually go when the stressor(s) that triggered them passes, or when we deploy better strategies for managing stress more effectively, allowing time for our body to recover and re-balance, we get caught in the anxiety trap/become tricked by anxiety.
"Many people are tricked... A sudden or prolonged state of stress may sensitise adrenaline-releasing nerves to produce the symptoms of stress in an exaggerated, alarming way. This state of sensitisation is well-known to doctors, but so little known to people generally that, when first experienced, it may bewilder and dupe it's victims in to becoming afraid of it. If asked to pinpoint the beginning [of problematic anxiety]… I would say that it is the moment when the sensitised person becomes afraid of the sensations produced by severe stress and so places himself in a cycle of fear-adrenaline-fear. In response to this fear, more adrenaline is released and his already sensitised body is thus stimulated to produce more and more intense sensations, which inspire more fear. This is the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle.” (Dr Claire Weekes, ‘Self-Help for Your Nerves’ (1997), page 8)
"Sufferers from these symptoms... are quite sure that there is something seriously wrong with them and cannot believe that anyone else could have such a distressing experience. Many feel convinced that they have a brain tumour (at least something 'deep seated') or that they are on the verge of madness. Their one wish is to be, as quickly as possible, the person they used to be before this 'horrible thing' happened to them. They are often not aware that their symptoms are nervous in origin and follow a well-recognised pattern shared by numerous others like themselves, the pattern of continuous fear and tension". (Dr Claire Weekes, ‘Self-help for Your Nerves’ (1997), page 11)
It is incredibly easy to get tricked/caught in the anxiety trap given that most people are not sufficiently informed about the physiology of anxiety. Even when we are informed, the actual experience of acute anxiety – its symptoms and sensations - can take us by surprise and be so bewildering, frightening and terrifying that, at the time, the only context we feel the experience warrants is a catastrophic one.
Examples of catastrophic thinking we might attach to the bewildering, frightening and terrifying symptoms and sensations of anxiety include:
- ‘I won’t be able to breathe!’ (catalysed by the experience of hyperventilation)
- ‘I am going to choke to death’ (catalysed by the experience of the anxiety symptom sensation of restriction/tightening of the throat or a lump in the throat)
- ‘I’ll be consumed by panic and collapse, have a heart attack, or die’. (catalysed by the very unpleasant and frightening experience of having a panic attack)
- ‘I will go insane and never recover’ (catalysed by the range of bewildering, frightening and disturbing symptoms and sensations that we are experiencing, including depersonalisation and derealisation)
- ‘If I leave the house nobody will be there to help me if things go wrong and I won’t be able to cope’ (catalysed by the unpleasant experience of acutely heightened anxiety symptoms and sensations/panic attack away from home)
- ‘If I go out in public I will lose control and embarrass myself’ (catalysed by the range of bewildering, frightening and terrifying symptoms and sensations that we seemingly have no control over)
- ‘I will lose control of my bladder in pubic and suffer unbearable shame!’ (catalysed by sensations/tightening in the bladder)
Furthermore, if we experience acute anxiety and catastrophic thinking when engaging with a specific type of situation, event, person, place or thing, we might come to associate that situation, event, person, place or thing with the sense of fear we felt. This is called fear association. For example, if we experience the symptoms and sensations of a panic attack in a public place we then might associate public places with a panic attack (this is how agoraphobic develops), or if we experience the symptoms and sensations of panic attack in a car we might then associate being in a car with a panic attack.
PHASE 3
To get some level of temporary relief from the unpleasant experience of our nervous system hyperarousal, the catastrophic thinking we engaged in as a result, and the situations, event, person, place or thing we came to associate all this with, we engage in safety and avoidance behaviours. For example, we might make sure we are with someone else in a public place (safety behaviour) or avoid public places completely (avoidance behaviour). Or we might make sure we were always driving and on our own in a car (safety behaviour), or we might avoid being in a car completely (avoidance behaviour).
PHASE 4
Our continued safety and avoidance behaviours reinforce our fear of the symptoms and sensations of our body’s freeze, fight, or flee response/nervous system hyperarousal, and the situations, events, persons, places or things with which we associate them with. This is because our safety and avoidance behaviours prevent our nervous system from habituating or, in other words, becoming accustomed to those symptoms and sensations, and the situations, events, persons, places or things we associate them with, and therefore relaxing with them. Consequently, those symptoms and sensations, situations, events, persons, places or things remain novel and fearful to us, and therefore arousing and anxiety provoking. Furthermore, avoidance tends to generalise over time and this may have also been our experience – for example, we might have started to avoid using the escalator at work and then, over time, we began to avoiding all escalators, and then perhaps all buildings with escalators.
Moreover, when we avoid something that scares us, we experience a sense of failure. Thus, every time we put an avoidance or safety behaviour in to place, our fear and anxiety gains power and control, whilst we lose some. The more we do this the more we accumulate experiences of failure, which provide more and more evidence of our inability to overcome the problem. Furthermore, safety and avoidance behaviours also eliminate practice. Without practice we cannot gain mastery, and without mastery confidence is less likely to rise.
Consequently, our attempts to avoid our anxiety through safety and avoidance behaviours only serve to magnify and reinforce it to the point where it has reached the level of phobia. At this level, our nervous system hyperarousal is so high when we are faced with the situation, event, person, place or thing which we have conditioned ourselves to fear and avoid, that we lose all perspective and rational thought. We also go to such extreme lengths to persistently avoid this situation, event, person, place or thing, so much so that our fear and anxiety significantly interferes with other areas of our life – e.g., even when we are removed from the situation, event, person, place or thing, there is always an undercurrent of fear and lack of personal power/confidence/control.
© Amanda Morgan