One of the surprising truths about anxiety is that it is normal to have too much anxiety. How can that be right? Does that even make sense? Well, yes, it is a fact about anxiety that evolution has delivered us a fear detecting system that is very heavily biased towards false alarms. In other words, most of the time you feel fear or anxiety, there is in fact no danger and the fear/anxiety is a false alarm. In other words, most of the times you hear a noise and worry there is in intruder in the house, there in fact isn’t; likewise most of the times you worry that someone dislikes you, they don’t. It has been estimated that a normal fear system will deliver as many as 999 false alarms for every 1 genuine case of danger [1]
Why are our brains like this? How has this happened?
Our brains have evolved to be biased towards false alarms for danger because of the high cost of missing a genuine danger. Consider this: if one of our ancestors was sleeping outside and they heard a noise then the cost of ignoring the noise if it really is a lion (and getting attacked) is much higher than the cost of running away from nothing (when the noise was just the wind or a mouse). Some have estimated the ratio of these costs to be 1000:1. In other words the cost of being attacked and seriously injured is at least 1000 times the cost of wasting energy by running away from nothing [1]. This means that your ancestors who were over-senstive to detecting danger would be more likely to leave offspring and therefore all of us today are over-sensitive to detecting danger. The normal brain may well activate fear or anxiety about 1000 times when there is in fact no danger. This figure will depend on other factors like how many lions or other threats there were in the environment in which we evolved. But 1000: 1 is a good ball park figure to illustrate the bias.
That sounds like a good thing then. Or is it?
Well, it is a good thing in one sense, but is also an annoying feature of being a human (or indeed any animal). Our natural high anxiety is one of the things that makes being a living creature difficult. Humans have added to the problem in at least two ways. First, our large frontal cortex and the imaginative skill it gives us (i.e. we can imagine the future, and ruminate on the past)—makes us activated by even more imagined threat signals (e.g. what if everyone laughs at me during the presentation?). Second, we have changed our environment so much from the environment in which our brains evolved (basically, hunter-gatherers on the African plains) that many of the danger signals our brains are attuned to are not as relevant today.
For example, we make tall buildings that are strong and safe, so being high up and looking out of a 17th storey window is not actually dangerous, but your brain might very well be activated into fear at this view, because for most of our evolutionary history being so high would indeed be dangerous. Likewise, a stranger making a rude comment on your picture on social media is not as bad as someone from your tribe saying they are going to kick you out of the social group, but the anxiety you feel in your gut could be just as strong. In a sense it “shouldn’t be” but it is, and there is an evolutionary reason why it is.
OK, so what we can do about having too much anxiety?
There are a number of solutions to the problem of having an overly trigger happy anxiety system.
- Forgive yourself! It’s not your fault that your brain delivers an excess of anxiety. So, the first step is to acknowledge that anxiety is normal and it is normal for it to be biased.
- Test the evidence. Given that anxiety is based on a biased danger-detection system, look at the actual evidence that you are in danger. For example, someone hasn’t replied to your email and you feel anxious that maybe they don’t like you. Look at the evidence for and against this interpretation. There are many reasons why someone hasn’t replied (they haven’t read it, they missed it, they are ill, etc). So write down a balance of evidence and estimated how likely it really is they don’t like you. You can do the same for all instances of anxiety.
- Accept that some anxiety is part of life. You cannot completely rid yourself of all anxiety (we do need some) so find ways to accept and tolerate some anxiety. For example, try some calm, slow breathing (e.g. count to 5 when you breath in, again when you breathe out) when anxious.
- Give some kindness to yourself. It does not feel pleasant to be anxious. If your child or a loved one were anxious you would probably say some kind words to them and try to soothe them. See if you can do the same for yourself. For example, say to yourself. “This is a moment of suffering. Suffering (anxiety) is part of life. All humans feel this. What I need now is a moment of kindness to myself” [2].
[1] Nesse, R. M. (2005). Natural selection and the regulation of defenses: A signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(1), 88-105.
[2] Neff, K. D. (2009). The role of self-compassion in development: A healthier way to relate to oneself. Human Development, 52(4), 211.