The Anxiety Cause – What Is It?

The anxiety cause is a bit of a paradox. Because it’s the same as the anxiety cure.

The cause of anxiety is your human brain.

What?

Yep. You heard that right. It’s your brain’s capacity for imagining a future, and for planning ahead, that allows you to be anxious.

And actually, anxiety is not all bad. It you couldn’t get anxious, you may not check to see that you’ve locked your car without healthy anxiety.

You wouldn’t buy health insurance without healthy anxiety.

You wouldn’t save for retirement without healthy anxiety.

You may not think of the feelings that prompt you to check stuff and plan ahead as anxiety, but they are. They are healthy anxiety.

It’s the unhealthy anxiety that causes you problems. Unhealthy anxiety keeps you stewing over your upcoming speech for days or weeks.

It keeps you replaying that argument you had last week – over and over and over.

The key to understanding this is to understand the relationship between fear and anxiety.

Fear vs Anxiety

They have a lot in common and one important difference.

Fear is the emotion your feel and the physical processes that happen when you experience a real and present danger.

If a dog charges up to you snarling and barking, you will feel fear.

If a speeding car swerves toward you, it’s fear you’ll feel.

With fear, you can see the danger and it’s happening right now.

With anxiety, the danger is not present. That makes the anxiety cause different from the cause of fear.

You are fearing something imagined. If you check to make sure you turned off the stove, it was imagining what could happen if you left it on that triggered your anxiety.

When you’re nervous for weeks about your upcoming speech, it’s because you’re imagining something like looking stupid, forgetting your topic or feeling humiliated.

OK, now that you’ve got the difference between fear and anxiety, let’s take a look at what happens in the body when you feel either one.

Fear and Anxiety in the Body

Both fear and anxiety set off the “fight or flight” response in your body. Here’s what happens.

Your heart and breathing speed way up. Blood is shut off from digestion and sent to your arms and legs (for running or fighting). Adrenalin is release and you get much more alert, energized and “high.”

Your immune system shuts down (do you really need to be spending your energy fighting a cold if a lion is chasing you?).

This is all good if the dog is after you or you need to act instantly to avoid a crash.

It’s not good at all if you’re in this fight or flight state day after day. That will really wear out your body fast. You’ll get exhausted. Your digestion will suffer.

Because I had chronic anxiety, I went on a mission to discover the anxiety cause - and more. Follow the link to learn what I've discovered.

The Good News?

Like I said above, the anxiety cause and the anxiety cure are closely related. They both require human consciousness. Stay tuned for more on the anxiety cure.