Anxiety is not the enemy
Six episodes on what anxiety is, why we have it, and what happens when it stops working for us.
THE APA DEFINITION
“Anxiety disorders are common mental health conditions that involve excessive fear, worry, or nervousness that interfere with daily life.” This is an accurate description, but everyone feels anxious, and most of the time it helps. This series is about the difference between the anxiety that works for you and the kind that does not.
THE STATISTICS
Anxiety is the most common group of mental disorders in the country.
Across all adults aged 16 to 85, more than one in six had an anxiety disorder in the previous twelve months, and women were markedly more affected than men (21% against 13%). Among 16 to 24 year olds the figure was almost one in three overall, and the gap was wider still: two in five young women, and roughly one in four young men. It is the most common mental disorder in Australia, and the most common at almost every age.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, 2020–2022.
SET POINT
Bad sleep, stress, illness, a hangover. Each one raises your resting level of anxiety, so it takes far less to tip you over. Anxiety is not a fixed trait. Everyone has a resting level, a set point that shifts with what is happening in the body.
Bad sleep, ongoing stress, illness or coming off alcohol all raise it. On a run-down day you start closer to the edge, so a small thing can push you over when the same thing would not have touched you rested. This is why anxiety can feel unpredictable, striking hard one day and barely registering the next.
The trigger is often not the real story. The starting point is.
PHYSIOLOGY
A panic attack is a flood of noradrenaline driving the heart. The supermarket did not cause it. That is just where you were standing.
A panic attack can feel like a heart attack, and many people who have one seek emergency care believing it is. What is actually happening is a surge of noradrenaline, the body’s alarm chemical, driving the heart rate up fast. One way to picture it is a false alarm sent from the brain to the heart. The feeling is real and physical, but the danger it signals usually is not. It also tends to attach itself to wherever you happen to be when it hits, so a supermarket or a train can start to feel like the cause. It was not. It was just the setting. Understanding the attack as a physiological event, not a sign of real danger, is the first step in loosening its grip.
UNCHALLENGED FEAR
Social anxiety is the fear of being judged. Separation anxiety is the fear of being apart. Both ease the moment you give in, and that relief is the problem.
On the surface these are two different fears: one about being watched and judged, the other about being away from the people you depend on. What they share is a mechanism. Both ease the moment you avoid the thing you fear, and that relief feels like proof. It teaches you the danger was real and that avoiding it kept you safe. So the fear is never tested, and never gets the chance to shrink. Each time you give in, avoidance is rewarded and the fear is reinforced. Facing it, and finding the danger does not arrive, is what actually breaks the loop, but it is the harder path every time.
INTERVENING
When a child is anxious, helping the parent can matter most. Anxious parents may overprotect, and protection can reinforce the very fear it means to prevent.
Childhood anxiety is not only about the child. When a child is frightened, an anxious parent’s instinct is to step in and remove the threat, and in the moment that soothes everyone. But it also teaches the child that the situation really was dangerous and that they could not have coped alone. The fear is confirmed rather than challenged, and the loop repeats: the child is anxious, the parent protects, the fear is confirmed. Helping parents to tolerate their own discomfort, and to let the child face manageable challenges, is often the more effective intervention. It runs against instinct, which is exactly why it is hard.
WHAT DEEPENS IT
A thought is not always true. It is the feeling attached to it that makes it convincing, and every strong reaction wears the track a little deeper.
Anxious thinking often looks like movement from the outside, but inside it is one thought going in circles, like doing laps. Each lap tends to end somewhere a little worse, until the thought starts to feel more and more likely to be true. What makes a thought convincing is not the thought itself but the feeling attached to it. React strongly enough, and often enough, and the track gets deeper and easier to fall into next time. (The track is a metaphor: there is no literal groove, only a habit that strengthens with use.) The thought is not the damage. The unseen loop is. Learning to notice the loop, rather than argue with the thought, is what begins to wear it back down.
OVERLAP
Anxiety speeds you up and depression shuts you down, and yet the most common form of depression is the two at once.
On the surface they look like opposites. One is noise, movement and escape; the other is withdrawal and stopping. But they overlap far more than that picture allows. The most common presentation is anxious depression, where both patterns run together: the restlessness and the flatness at the same time. It is why someone can feel wired and exhausted at once, and why treating the two as separate opposites so often misses what is actually happening.
Anxiety is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working, sometimes too hard, sometimes at the wrong moment. Across the series we have tried to show how it works, when it turns, and what actually helps.