Understanding Anxiety, Part V: Thought and Behaviour

Understanding Anxiety, Part V: Thought and Behaviour

At this point, we have a general idea of how anxiety works, what it consists of, and how it develops. We’ve also had an initial look at the main techniques and strategies for learning to regulate it, both breathing exercises and attentional control strategies. Now, it’s important to consider two main issues that will influence the form and development of both the anxious process and my own capacity for regulation.

What do I think?

As with everything, how we interpret a situation will influence the anxiety it provokes. This doesn’t mean that the only important thing is what I think about the situation, or that we can 100% control the anxiety a situation causes us by changing what we think about it. That’s not the case, and there will be situations where it’s normal to have a certain level of anxiety, such as a traffic accident. However, this doesn’t mean that the influence of our interpretations is non-existent, and that it can’t be useful to stop and consider whether the anxiety I feel is really justified.

At this point, it’s important to be cautious, as our capacity for reasoning about emotional situations will be mediated both by the emotion itself and by my pre-established unconscious beliefs about the situation. In this sense, it’s likely that therapeutic work will be necessary to properly investigate and explore these beliefs. Therefore, working on those beliefs that predispose us to catastrophic thinking, for example, will be useful when learning to live with and regulate the anxiety that these situations arouse.

What do I do?

To work therapeutically on anxiety, it’s important not only to know how it started but also to consider what factors are currently maintaining it. Many of the symptomatic aspects that are a consequence of anxiety, such as avoidance strategies, substance use, etc., are precisely what help to maintain the anxious state, preventing anxiety from being regulated correctly and maintaining the relative importance of the symptoms themselves. In this sense, we must understand that anxiety will always occur in a context, and as such, our ability to move and regulate our anxiety doesn’t mean it’s exclusively a personal cause. There’s no point in feeling guilt. Anxiety is a normal physiological response of the body, and just as it can manifest through thoughts or be aggravated by how I interpret the situation, it’s still directly influenced by the context and environment I move in. In this way, it’s often the environment itself that, due to its particular characteristics, triggers my anxious response. No one in their right mind would say, for example, that in a situation of global crisis and lockdown our anxiety is exclusively internal and unaffected by the situation. So, there’s no point in blaming ourselves; instead, we can learn how it works and do what’s in our power to regulate it. Similarly, we may encounter situations that are beyond our control, and in which we have to seek professional help to deal with them. Of course, there’s no problem with this either, as we can’t and aren’t obliged to know how to respond efficiently to every situation that arises. We should understand asking for help as something natural, a consequence of knowing that we are human, accepting that we don’t have to know how to solve everything. Knowing how to ask for help, insofar as we accept our human condition, is much closer to being a strength than a weakness*.

*Note: On Strengths and Weaknesses.

The comment about asking for help as a strength is necessary and comes from the need to acknowledge our own limitations. The idea that we have to be able to solve everything is based mainly on a matter of ego, almost in an anthropocentric sense, of feeling superior, or needing to feel superior, both individually and socially. However, that same idea, insofar as it’s lived with rigidity, distances us from others, excessively individualises us, causing us to lose the opportunity to lean on our fellow human beings. It’s this ability to accept our own inability that leads us to ask for help, to lean on others, and in this way, as social beings, strengthens us.