Anxiety is one of the most common and debilitating symptoms reported by clients seeking therapy. It can encompass myriad problems. The disruption it causes to daily life is one of the key indicators the NHS uses to assess emotional health.

The fight, flight or freeze response that underlies anxiety is a practical biological response to a possible threat. It’s caused by the limbic system – the most primitive part of the brain. It triggers hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol – the messengers that send your body into a state of emergency and readiness – directing blood and oxygen to where it’s needed most. This can be life-saving when danger lurks around every corner, but can cause more harm than good when activated by a power-point presentation or a missed train! It obeys a rather crude process of ‘better safe than sorry’ to aid the survival of the species.

The more reflective and analytic parts of the brain have evolved to exert some control over these extreme reactions. When this fails, we can rush into fights, lose our temper, or freeze in fear. The ‘pumped-up’ athlete can positively use anxiety to enhance their performance, but too great a ‘rush of blood’ can ruin it!

General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) describes the condition of chronic and acute anxiety – the human version of a car alarm that blares obnoxiously every time a leaf harmlessly floats past. For such people – and those around them – this near constant state of emergency is understandably exhausting. Conditions such as social anxiety, panic disorder, claustrophobia or agoraphobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are separate diagnoses involving high levels of discomforting but generally treatable stress.

Reducing the Rush

Most people experience some anxiety during difficult times. If our nervous system is imagined as a bucket, our life challenges can be symbolised by the water in it. When the bucket overflows with one stressor too many, the water may spill over the rim. The camel’s back is broken by one straw too many, the engorged stomach explodes due to one too many wafer-thin mints! (One for you Monty Python fans.) Reducing the level by making small holes in this metaphorical container can reduce anxiety to something more manageable.

Removing some stressors altogether is the ideal way forward. Stress unnecessarily creeps into our lives in many small ways. Habits like smoking, alcohol, drugs and bad diet may offer short-term relief, but usually just delay and exacerbate the damage. Other influential factors may be the TV you watch, the company you keep, how much coffee you drink, the responsibilities and activities that do more harm than good… Making a periodical inventory – a kind of emotional spring cleaning – can help identify which habits ease or complicate your life.

Your GP can offer medical support for conditions such as insomnia that aggravate anxiety. Unhelpful habits ingrained in early life may suggest the value of counselling to change them. Treatment tends to control rather than cure, but the mind can be trained to be less sensitive to the scaremongering of the environment. Exercise can harness nervous energy, while relaxing activities like yoga, meditation and mindfulness can teach you to operate at less stressful levels.

Deeper sources of anxiety may be more problematic such as a long-term health condition or worries about friends and family. In such cases, try dividing your concerns into two groups. Firstly, those that cannot be changed, but can perhaps be handled better by your learning to accept them. The second category can be reserved for those you can positively improve. It may be a failing relationship or an unsatisfying job. Doing nothing about the situation is liable to make it worse.

The insecurities of your childhood may no longer exist today. The recurring nightmare of physical or sexual abuse – or flight from a war zone – are examples of traumas that may ripple destructively throughout later life when the danger has passed. Similarly, the inheriting of an anxious disposition through the lessons or genes of an over-protective parent can benefit from the appropriate re-education of our nervous system to our current needs.

Short-term counselling or more extensive psychotherapy can teach you to see the wood for the trees of your emotional life. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help rewire your thinking to escape the persecution of phobias that hold your life back, while specialised treatments like Eye Motion Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) are often successful in overcoming the trauma behind PTSD.

Reducing stress can give you back control of your world. We may be programmed to feel anxiety for good reasons, but you can always have too much of a good thing.

Useful links

nhs.uk/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder/ explains the symptoms of GAD and how to treat it along with other conditions where anxiety is prevalent.

anxietyuk.org.uk offers a wealth of information on specific disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling), and Body Dismorphic Disorder that are related to anxiety, and gives details of a range of treatments.

mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/anxiety-and-panic-attacks