The experience of living with constant anxiety It is so unpleasant and disabling that sufferers long to be forever rid of this problem and its distressing warning signs. However, anxiety signals are not bad in themselves. Their function is to alert us and activate us in the face of a problem or threat.
We live in a society with such a high level of demand that many people internalize, from their childhood, the pattern of living with such an extreme level of anxiety. They are continually walking a tightrope and in danger of being overwhelmed.
This extreme anxiety ends up distorting the true essence of this much-needed emotion. If we continually feel anxiety, at times when we really need this alert signal to protect ourselves, we will be unable to recognize the true danger to which we are exposed.
What is the desirable level of anxiety?
In a very similar situation to this was Arantxa, a girl who told me, in our first consultation session, her desire to never again feel the suffocation and palpitations she had suffered in her anxiety attacks.
Obviously, this was the main goal of our therapy, however, it was also we talked about the need to seek a healthy balance in which anxiety was not the norm, but a natural alert signal that will be activated only when necessary.
It is normal to feel nervous or alert when a dangerous or uncertain situation occurs that we do not know how to deal with. At this time, in order to face the situation with all possible resources, it is healthy for our internal alarms to go off and for our bodies to be flooded with stress hormones.
These occasions can be brief, such as being about to be run over, or longer in time, such as being fired at work. In both junctures, it is healthy and necessary to maintain a state of alert to jump and avoid being run over, or to go out and look for a new job.
For people who suffer from anxiety, the worst problem is that the alert remains activated 24 hours a day, so any small detail or a simple thought can trigger the crisis.
Why is anxiety sometimes excessive?
This constant alert pattern usually originates in childhood when the little ones do not have many other alternatives to defend themselves and the only thing they can do is prevent and be aware of possible dangers.
Each person can reach this type of pattern due to different situations or reasons, but the most frequent circumstance that I have encountered, in all my years of experience in therapy, is that, one way or another, as children, they have learned that the world is a dangerous place (or that some situations can be dangerous). ) and that they must be continuously alert and alert to protect themselves.
In the case of Arantxa, she came from a dysfunctional family, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally absent mother. As in this type of family, any small detail could unleash his father’s anger and blows.
Living in this environment, little Arantxa, in order to avoid her father’s bad mood, learned to stay very attentive to any detail that could anticipate the danger.
Over time, this state of alert was generalized and reached other areas of life de Arantxa, limiting her mobility. Any daily situation, such as traveling by bus or going shopping, generated very high levels of anxiety.
How to achieve balance in anxiety
In therapy, we were working in parallel, with his present and his past, to Deprogram that idea of ”constant alert” as something necessary to avoid all possible dangers.
Arantxa learned to differentiate the level of danger in each situation and he rewired his brain so that, if the occasion required it, this emotion could be activated, but that he would remain calm, if he detected no real danger.
Little by little, Arantxa he lowered his base level of anxiety and reconciled with this much-needed emotion. ANDHe did not want to completely eliminate it from his life, but instead found a space for it in his mind and body to be able to resort to it and activate it only when it was essential.