Anxiety: Nature’s Overactive Alarm System

As a family therapist, I have heard children as young as 5 properly use the word anxiety in a sentence.  Teenagers routinely answer the question, “How are you doing this week?” with an eloquent assessment of their current anxiety level.  I am obviously thrilled to hear mental health terms normalized in our children’s dialect.  However, I also sense that “anxiety” has replaced “stress” as a catch-all term for emotional distress.  Anxiety is not just a bad thing that we want to minimize.  The reality is much more complicated.

Anxiety has a biological purpose.  When our anxiety gets triggered, our bodies literally prepare to take on a threat.  While it can feel intensely unpleasant, anxiety is actually trying to protect us.  Anxiety is like a siren warning us of danger.   We need the siren.  But most of us need our overly-sensitive siren to be recalibrated to detect actual danger. 

This is where exposure and CBT therapy come in.  In CBT therapy, we learn to interact with the alarm system before the siren goes off.  You can think of CBT as a reprogramming of the siren while it is offline.  CBT teaches us that many of our automatic thoughts are negatively distorted.

In exposure therapy (clinically known as Exposure Response Prevention or ERP) we literally set the siren off on purpose.  We train ourselves to tolerate and tune out the siren over time so that we are not so jarred and disturbed when it goes off. Eventually, because we are ignoring and tolerating the discomfort of the siren, it can just fade into the background of our lives. 

Anxiety itself, like a warning siren, is not inherently a bad thing.  In therapy, we learn to appreciate the true purpose of anxiety while minimizing its potential to damage.