With anxiety at epidemic proportions, there’s a critical need to help people to shift from worry, stress and fear to resilient and effective action. It is my heart-driven mission to help people to feel empowered to alleviate anxiety and build mind strength. But when we talk about anxiety, what exactly do we mean?

Anxiety is an essential survival mechanism

It has been with us since primitive times, when life was simple and things in our surroundings were either friend or foe. What mattered most was self-protection and protection of the tribe. If humans encountered danger, such as a predator in their midst, the stress reaction was triggered and we were primed to run away, to hide, or to fight to protect ourselves against the life-threatening situation.

This protective mechanism is still much the same as it was in primitive times. The human brain is hard-wired to anticipate and prepare for imminent danger. You want to be able to predict and have certainty in your environment, in order to be able to protect. Imagine you were a cave-person leaving your cave, unable to see around the corner – something dangerous might be lurking there, ready to pounce.

Only now you find yourself in contemporary society – and here is the challenge. You live in an era of disruption with an intensification of uncertainty. You now live in a constant state of change, no longer experiencing the somewhat predictable movement through life of a bygone era. You are no longer in fight or flight to prepare yourself for encounters with tigers or crocodiles. Instead, you are in fight or flight with uncertainty.

You are in the boxing ring – and what are you fighting?

This is where the issue lies. In an attempt to grapple with uncertainty, you engage in a mental process that ends up having the opposite effect of its intended purpose. This mental process is worry. Worry is your struggle with the ‘what if’s’. 

Worry is ‘perceived’ threat 

The challenge with worry is that it is a pursuit for certainty when there is no certainty. But rather than sit with the discomfort of uncertainty, you struggle, you grapple, you fight to get certainty. Your brain was simply not designed to sit comfortably with uncertainty.

The problem is that the fight or flight reaction doesn’t just get triggered in response to a real threat; it also gets triggered in response to a perceived threat – a worry thought. Your brain sets up your body to fight or to run away in much the same way as a real threat. Worry triggers a surge of adrenaline and cortisol in your blood stream; it is this neurochemical reaction that you experience as anxiety or stress. You are fighting against the voice of worry, the bully that bosses you around in your mind to alert you to all the bad things that might happen in the future.

Worry is your inherent desire to self-protect, predict and shape the world around you in order to have certainty, control and safety from the perceived threat. Uncertainty – the what if – is your ‘uber’ threat. Where there is uncertainty, there is the possibility that something bad might happen, so you fight it, struggle with it and try to get rid of it. You engage in all kinds of mental and physical behaviours to avoid it.

How the brain responds to a worry thought

Your brain responds to a worry thought as if it was a real threat – as if you were being chased or backed into a cave by a tiger. As a result, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for your thoughts, beliefs and perception of the world, sends a message to the amygdala in the limbic system of the brain, to say that something dangerous is happening.

As the primitive stress reaction of fight, flight or freeze is triggered, the survival mechanism is now working overtime. Your brain gets ‘hijacked’ by the amygdala – the part of it that sets up your body to self-protect – to fight, to run, or to hide. You are overtaken by anxiety, anger or stress, and you can no longer think straight.

Have you ever been getting all stressed out and someone has told you to, ‘just calm down’? What happens to you in that moment? Typically, it’s pretty challenging to just calm down, right? This is the amygdala hijack in action. The amygdala has set up your body to be primed and ready to pounce or to run. In that moment, your brain is not responding to the rationality of ‘just calm down’ – it’s thinking that if it just calms down, an imminent threat will attack. We’ve all experienced this – it’s one of those ‘part of being human’ things. It’s completely and absolutely normal. All the amygdala wants in that moment is to be heard – it is there to protect you and if it isn’t heard and is just being told instead to switch off, it’s going to fire even louder.

To alert you to the possibility of danger, you get a surge of neurochemicals through your bloodstream, such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, to set up your body to attack or to run. This rush of neurochemicals is what you experience as anxiety or stress.

The problem with the amygdala hijack in these moments is that you’re fighting against a perceived threat, not a real threat – you are fighting against the voice of worry, the bully that bosses you around in your mind to alert you to all the bad things that might happen in the future, and so the surge of adrenaline, cortisol and noradrenaline serves no purpose other than whooshing around in your bloodstream.

But your amygdala isn’t the enemy

It’s just like one of those annoying car alarms that keep going off when it doesn’t need to; it is a little like a friend who gives bad advice from time to time. You have to know when to not get caught up in the alarm bell, but to recognise that it is, in fact, a false alarm. This is when you need the capacity for self-awareness and the tools and techniques to turn the alarm off and to get on with the things you want to get on with – what I call ‘heart-driven’ rather than fear-driven action.

To discover more about how to conquer anxiety, order your copy of my book “The Mind Strength Method: Four Steps to Curb Anxiety, Conquer Worry and Build Resilience” on Booktopia.