Understanding Anxiety

We’re born to “feel.” And learning to navigate those feelings is a vital life skill. But sometimes those feelings can become too much and leave us anxious and overwhelmed, even getting in the way of daily life. Watch as Mayer Bellehsen, PhD, offers a deeper look at anxiety, and how to know when you might need help dealing with yours.

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So today we're going to talk a little bit about the nature of anxiety, as well as anxiety disorders and some ways that people can get help.

Anxiety is a part of life. Oftentimes, people talk about anxiety, they mean really something like worry and stress. Even good things like buying a house or getting married can create some worry. Sometimes anxiety can actually even be adaptive and helpful. If we didn't worry about things like making enough money to provide for ourselves and our families, then we wouldn't be doing things to make sure that we take care of that. However, sometimes anxiety can become a little bit excessive or too much, and that can lead to what we would call anxiety disorders. There's a lot of reasons that people can have an anxiety disorder—genetics, family history, a history of significant life events, life stressors, maybe sometimes some personality, and some disruptions in brain chemistry as well.

Roughly, 40 million US adults carry a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. And that translates to about 18% to 19% of the population having an anxiety disorder in any year. Typically, when those life events pass, the worry and anxiety goes down. If the anxiety is staying high and is becoming very difficult to manage and to function, there's difficulties with sleeping or too much irritability or difficulties concentrating, that just build up over time and affect a person's quality of life. It can be worthwhile to have a conversation with a physician or a behavioral health specialist to get a better understanding of what you can do to help yourself with anxiety.

There are many types of anxiety disorders. I want to highlight three of them:

• Generalized anxiety disorder, which is about having excessive worry about numerous things for a period of six months that is really affecting one's life and functioning.
• Panic disorder, which is about having many panic attacks and then worrying about having panic attacks and having that affect one's life as well.
• And then we could think about phobias, which are about fears of either specific events or things like a fear of heights. But we can also consider social anxiety and social phobia sometimes as another type of anxiety disorder, which is about being afraid or anxious in interpersonal situations.

So, if somebody is having anxiety, we try to help them first with understanding some of the causes of the anxiety. We often encourage people to think of ways that they can cope with anxiety, usually by doing things to help promote a sense of safety, a sense of calming, maybe some connection to supportive people in their life and loved ones, maybe dealing with whatever the problem is at hand, and recognizing that, in time, this will pass.

When it's an anxiety disorder, some of these same principles apply, but also, there's some really great therapies available such as cognitive behavioral therapy, which can help people change their relationship to their thoughts and their body, techniques like calming interventions like meditation breathing. Those can be very helpful. But we can also try to use strategies such as thinking about our anxiety differently, challenging some of our fears and our negative thoughts.

One of the big things about anxiety is sometimes we become anxious about being anxious. Helping ourselves to accept some of the anxiety more, as opposed to wanting to just eliminate it, that can help. We often want to avoid the things that are causing us anxiety. And if it's not really a dangerous situation, we want to try to not avoid the things that are causing us anxiety, but help ourselves get more comfortable with what's causing anxiety.