Let's learn about anxiety
Counselling Directory statistics show that anxiety continues to be the number one reason that people seek the support of a therapist.

I am regularly asked by my clients, what causes anxiety and why do I have it?
These are good questions, so let’s delve right in and look at some of the answers.
First, it’s useful to know that anxiety is something that every one of us experiences and in fact, we all need it to a certain extent to help us navigate through life safely. It’s what we call our body’s fight or flight or even a freeze response, think of the possum who famously plays dead when facing danger.
Ordinarily, anxiety is instinctive in each of us and acts almost like our very own internal alarm system alerting us to danger and prepping our body, getting us ready to respond in the best way we can to minimise or avoid any harm when we are facing a potential threat.
How many of us I wonder might feel a little anxious finding ourselves in a strange place or when meeting new people for the first time? Can you remember heading out on your first date or the day you walked through the door to start your first job? Maybe you noticed your heart beginning to beat a little faster and your breathing becoming a tad more rapid?
What you were experiencing was a low level of anxiety, your body instinctively and automatically preparing you just in case there was an unseen danger.
There is very little risk to us in these types of examples, but they do show us how anxiety acts almost like an early warning system and activates in response to even the tiniest hint of threats.
Here's a scarier example. If you can, try to imagine sitting in a room when a lion walks in. Once we recognise there is danger, again our anxiety responses are activated, but this time much more rapidly and acutely than in our earlier examples and automatically our breathing and heart rate will very quickly start to increase, extra oxygen will begin to circulate in our bloodstream and our muscles will begin to tense.
We already know that anxiety is instinctive in each one of us so let’s look at how we might respond, and which response, fight, flight or freeze might give us our best chance of survival if we had to deal with something like this in reality.
Perhaps 'fight' might not be the right option when faced with a lion, and while playing dead behind the sofa and not daring to move just might work for the possum, perhaps adopting the freeze response option could lead to us achieving a bad outcome.
Our only hope might be flight; to instinctively run away as fast as our legs can carry us and with our muscles already tensed and extra oxygen now flowing through our body thanks to our anxiety responses, we are ready and primed to escape from danger. Our anxiety alerted us early on to the threat, prepared our body and gave us our best chance to escape and survive.
We can also see that our level of anxiety rises as the perceived threat increases. The level of anxiety we might face when going out on our first date will not equate to what we would experience if we found ourselves in a life-or-death situation.
Imagine then that we have now escaped from our lion and reached safety. Our breathing slows down, our muscles begin to relax, and our anxiety begins to slowly subside. Anxiety has done its job of keeping us safe and we can go happily on our way until the next time we may face a threat when the cycle begins again.
All of what we have learned so far describes normal anxiety responses but imagine if these did not switch off and we had to go through each day with a high level of anxiety, our body keeping us in a state of high alert when there is no lion or any other obvious danger present.
We can all agree that it would become exhausting very quickly and would begin to impact our lives in a very negative way. Consider the many physical reactions or conditions that we can experience or acquire as a result of being exposed to ongoing anxiety: headaches, insomnia, loss of appetite, bowel complaints, and tinnitus, to name just a few.
We will begin to develop defence mechanisms as a response to increased anxiety, perhaps starting to avoid people and places where we might normally go. We can only imagine the severe impact this could have on our work, family and social life.
The reasons that anxiety can become problematic are individual and complex and require professional help from a suitably qualified counsellor who can help to unpack life experiences when our anxiety first started to become problematic.
Strategies that can be used to try and reduce our level of anxiety might include things like teaching desensitisation, controlled exposure, and learning calming techniques such as controlled breathing and progressive muscle relaxation.
One thing that I have learned in my counselling role is that chronic anxiety will not be reduced without intervention. It is very important if you are worried that your level of anxiety is too high that you speak firstly to your GP and then to a counsellor who will be able to help you.
I hope that you have found this short article on anxiety useful.
Counselling can change your life. If this is something that you think you might need to do, please, reach out to a professional.
