Anxiety: What Your Nervous System Is Trying to Tell You

Anxiety is well known as a challenge experienced by us all at some point in our lives. It can cause difficulties in our thinking and also on a bodily level. For many people living with chronic anxiety, it is exhausting, constraining, and can make ordinary life feel like an endurance event.

Some anxiety is necessary. It gets us out of bed in the morning. It motivates us to care about and pursue the things that matter most to us. It helps us to anticipate consequences, prepare carefully, and stay alert to what is happening around us. Some of the most driven, thoughtful, conscientious people we know are also the most anxious. Anxiety and ambition, attentiveness, and deep empathy, often coexist - a similarly activated nervous system gives rise to them all.

Understanding our anxiety means starting from a place of genuine curiosity about what it is doing and what it is trying to communicate to us.

What anxiety actually is

Anxiety is the activation of the body’s threat response in anticipation of something that has not yet happened. The amygdala (the brain’s threat detection system) reads a real or imagined cue, and triggers a sympathetic nervous system response. This sends a cascade of physiological changes through our cells to prepare the body for action. Our heart rate increases, breathing shallows, vision can blur, muscles tighten, attention narrows, our palms sweat, and we may have digestive distress or an urge to use the toilet. These are all signs of our bodies mobilising for action.

Our brain’s threat detection system has evolved to keep us alive in genuinely dangerous environments. The difficulty is that in modern life, that same system gets activated in response to a difficult email, a social media post, a text, a social situation, a looming deadline, concern about something we may have said, an embarrassing event, or our worries about the future. And when these things happen, our brains and bodies respond with the same level of physiological intensity that they would bring to a physical threat. We aren’t able to distinguish well between stressors and what those different types of stressors require from us. And so our bodies respond to the stories that our brains are telling us about the level of danger present.

The parasympathetic nervous system (our rest and digest system) brings our bodies back to their comfortable baselines once a threat has passed. Anxiety doesn’t become problematic because we respond to threat. The challenges occur because our threat systems get activated too frequently and too intensely, and also because our parasympathetic nervous systems struggle to settle things back down afterwards.

The stories we tell, and where they come from

Chronic anxiety is rarely random and tends to follow our histories. Our nervous systems learn what to be alert to from the environments in which they develop. The stories that we carry about ourselves and the world are often laid down long before we had language to examine them. They also play a role in what we perceive as threat and how we react when our threat response is triggered.

For some people, hypervigilance was a way to stay safe in an unpredictable childhood. We may have learned to read the room constantly and that scanning was adaptive. The difficulty is that our nervous systems do not automatically retire a strategy that worked, even when the original conditions are long gone.

Other children became a kind of emotional lightning rod for the adults around them, absorbing and managing distress that was not theirs to carry. For others still, acceptance felt conditional, and they may have worked hard to please others or to be as unproblematic as possible. This may have produced a chronic low-level vigilance.

Undiagnosed neurodiversity is another important thread to acknowledge. A nervous system that processes the world more intensely, that is more easily overwhelmed by sensory or social input, that has spent years working hard to manage environments that were not designed with it in mind, is a nervous system under chronic strain. Here, anxiety is an understandable, inevitable response to the ongoing mismatch.

Anxiety as signal

It may be helpful to reframe anxious thoughts as signals to be listened to rather than noise to be quietened. The anxious mind often asks questions: what if this goes wrong, what if I am not enough, what if they leave, what if I cannot cope? The challenge is that these questions are rarely answered. Often they are managed, avoided, distracted from, or suppressed, and as a result the underlying concerns never get the attention they desire.

Sitting with an anxious question long enough to actually examine it, is different from being swept along by it. What is this thought pointing to? Is there something here that needs addressing (a genuine concern that deserves practical attention)? We rarely reach a point of reasoning that we have a 100% success rate for surviving each and every challenge that has ever come our way.

What maintains chronic anxiety

Anxiety is often sustained by the strategies that we have developed to manage it. Keeping our lives small, avoiding situations that trigger our threat response, staying within the familiar. These are all ways of trying to reduce anxiety in the short term, while confirming it in the long term. By avoiding situations, we never get the chance to learn if they were survivable. And the world stays as dangerous as our nervous systems believe(d) it to be.

The stories that we tell about ourselves are also a part of what maintains our anxiety. The narrative of being someone who cannot cope, needs to be careful, or who should not push too hard, can often become self-fulfilling.

Downregulation and the body that needs nourishment

A nervous system that has been running on high alert needs more than the absence of stress. It needs active, deliberate experiences that signal to the body that it is safe to rest. Genuine restoration for you, may look like many things: perhaps a walk that clears your head, a yoga class that brings you back into the body, a moment of peace filled silence, a conversation with a trusted friend that leaves you feeling more like yourself, time in nature that quietens the noise in your mind.

When our bodies are chronically deprived of genuine restoration, we have fewer mental, physical and emotional resources for managing the next time our threat system is activated. A body that is regularly nourished is able to develop a new baseline where over time, the inevitable experiences of stress and anxiety become increasingly manageable.

Stepping towards rather than away

You will know firsthand that anxiety keeps life smaller than you would prefer it to be. This is because the nervous system is doing its job - protecting you against a list of perceived threats that has undoubtedly expanded over time. Stepping towards rather than away from the situations that produce anxiety, is how things gradually change.

Over time, you can build evidence for yourself, that the world is more manageable than your threat system currently believes it to be. That evidence tends to accumulate slowly, and it can require support, because sometimes trying to do it alone can produce avoidance, negative predictions, or overwhelm.

What therapy can offer

Therapy for anxiety is about understanding the story that your nervous system has been telling you. Where that story came from, and whether it still fits. Therapy is about developing a different, more curious relationship with our anxious minds.

Therapy is also about exploring the relational dimension: examining our histories and how they have shaped our threat response. Understanding what current relationships are doing to maintain or challenge our anxiety. Building our capacity to move towards a version of life that is not organised primarily around staying safe from the things that our nervous systems have learned to fear.

Therapy helps us to move towards the things that matter most to us, the activities and relationships that nourish us and the versions of ourselves that exist on the other side of the anxiety.

If anxiety has been keeping your world smaller than you would like it to be, and you are interested in exploring therapy to help you manage it differently, you are welcome to get in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and ‘Walk and Talk’ Therapy in North West London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.