Danielle Thornton explains anxiety comes from life experiences and what you learned from your caregivers. Avoidance feels safe but shrinks your world and erodes self-trust. Anxiety is learned, not genetic, so you can unlearn it by identifying your patterns and practicing new skills.
Hey everybody, Danielle Thornton here. And I wanted to come on today to talk about why you have anxiety and why maybe someone else that you know doesn't have anxiety. There's really two reasons why we experience anxiety. The first one is our life experience. Oftentimes we've had traumatic events, either one kind of big event or several little events. It could be numerous things. And when I say traumatic events, it doesn't necessarily have to be the normal abuse or near death experiences or anything major that a lot of people think about when they hear trauma. It could be something as small as you're at the mall with your mom, you turn around and she's not there, and you can't find her for a couple minutes and then you end up finding each other and everything's fine. But sometimes that can create a lot of fear in somebody. It could also be kind of a chronic disconnection from a parent. For whatever reason they might be dealing with their own experiences, they might have to work a lot. I mean, there's a lot of little things that can kind of cause us trauma or really strong feelings that would cause anxiety later on. The other one is learned behavior. So a lot of people with anxiety can tell you that they had a mom or a dad or several family members even that also experienced anxiety. And so as we're growing up, we don't realize it so much, but we are taking in everything the people around us say and do. And when they're saying and doing the same kinds of things.
Fearful statements, avoidance, those kinds of things, we're going to naturally.
Have those same behaviors, think those same thoughts, and we don't even really do it on purpose. So the traumatic experiences and the learned behavior are the two main reasons why that you are probably experiencing anxiety in your life right now. And what happens is that.
When we, when we have a traumatic experience and we don't know what to do with it, we naturally have to learn our own coping mechanisms. The first coping mechanism that you might have created to help ease your anxiety is worry or rumination. And what rumination means is you're thinking about something over and over and over again. You have a hard time not thinking about it. It's kind of like a lower level obsessing. And so it's just a mental compulsion that we have that we think if we worry about it, that we're going to be able to control it. It's our mind's way of feeling, like if we can just analyze it enough that we're going to figure it out. The reality Is though, we have no control over what happens outside of us. So it's just something that adds to our pain and, and creates more of those neural pathways in our brain that makes it more likely that we're going to do that. So it's very, very ineffective. Very common, but very ineffective. The other coping mechanism that we often create is avoidance.
When we have a fear or we have anxiety, we tend to avoid the people, places, and things that we feel like might bring on that anxiety. And obviously that can be very harmful in our lives because it keeps us from experiencing life number one, but it also really keeps us from learning to trust ourselves. That is really, really huge. And so the more we avoid things that we think might cause us harm, the more we experience life less, and we just learn not to trust ourselves and that life isn't safe. And when we have those limiting beliefs, it affects us in so many, so many different ways. And so a lot of you might be asking, you know, how does this play into real risky situations? Right? There's situations where we know there's a threat and that threat is real, and then we avoid that situation. Those are healthy fears. When the threat is high and the risk is high and we act on that, then that's healthy. What's unhealthy is that when the risk is low and the threat is low, that we act on it as if the threat was high. And so that's kind of the difference between how we would act and behave when there's a real threat and a real fear versus something that isn't zero threat, but is low. So one of those examples is.
Let'S say, you know that if you drink and then get in the car, you're going to more likely have a chance of getting in an accident or getting hurt or hurting somebody else. And so you avoid that behavior. That's healthy because the risk involved there is legitimate. It's realistic. It's a higher risk event. But if you are afraid to drive in general, and you decide, I'm just not gonna drive my car anymore, then that's not so healthy. Because the risk when you're driving of, you know, usually the fear is, I'm going to die. The risk of dying in a car accident is pretty low. Again, it's not zero, but it is very, very low compared to other risks. And so that's why.
It'S important that we look at the risk versus the threat. And then we look at our level of anxiety in relation to that. And when things are out of whack, when you have. The threat is way up here. I'm sorry, the anxiety is way up here, but the threat is down here. There's a mismatch, and that's when you know that it's not quite as healthy. The really good thing about all this, though, is anxiety is not genetic. It's not in your blood. It's not a disease that you can't get rid of. You have learned this behavior, and the awesome thing is that you can unlearn it. I know this because I've done it myself. And so.
The key is to know why. Again, you know, actually, you don't have to know why. You don't even have to know why you have anxiety. It just helps sometimes to kind of know where it comes from.
But after you know the why, and you've kind of explored that a little bit, the key is to look at what you know, what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what your behaviors are around fear. And then after you know the what, then you can take action on the how. How do you behave and how do you behave differently to get rid of your anxiety? What are those skills that you need to learn and practice in order to alleviate your anxiety? And the practice word is really the key because what happens is most people kind of learn some tools.
And they try them once or twice and then they give up because it's not working. Their expectation that that tool is going to work right away is usually way out of whack. So the key is to practice, practice, practice every single day. Because when you've had anxiety for fill in the blank, you know, 15, 20 years, you're not going to get rid of it, and two hours or two days or two weeks. And what I see over and over and over again is people just giving up really easily and not giving the tools time enough to actually work and not being patient enough with themselves. So I hope you got some something out of this video. Make sure you click like below. If you did like this video, subscribe to this channel because next week I am going to go more into the what. What are the behaviors that you do that are feeding your anxiety and keeping it going? So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon. Bye.
