What is Anxiety and How Does it Effect Your Life | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Anxiety Assessment

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on what causes anxiety. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. In this short video, we're going to talk about the function of anxiety, the connection between anxiety and the stress response, or the HPA axis, and the impact of anxiety on perception, schema and problem solving. Anxiety is triggered by the threat of loss, and that can be the loss of a life. Whether it is the loss of your life or you're worried that somebody else is in danger, or even a pet, it can be triggered by the loss of dreams or hope. If you had always dreamed of something happening and it looks like that's not going to happen, or if you look towards the future and what you would always envisioned as your future is not going to come to pass, you could feel anxious about that. A loss of meaning or understanding can also trigger anxiety. When the world goes topsy turvy and you can't figure out, okay, what happened? How do I anticipate what's going on? That can trigger anxiety. The loss of relationships, whether it is your self esteem or relationships with other people, can trigger anxiety as well as the loss of control. As humans, we like to have some element of control over our lives. And when there's a big unknown out there, or when we face a direct threat of loss of control, we face a direct threat that somebody is going to tell us what we have to do. It can trigger anger or anxiety. Sometimes we feel anxious when we are worried about a loss of status because of a failure. If you fail a project or if you fail a test, it could mean that you lose status, your grade goes down, or maybe you lose status from being the valedictorian down to not being the valedictorian anymore and stuff. And I put this one on here because sometimes it does trigger feelings of anxiety. If you're worried that you're going to lose stuff, if that stuff is important to you, it can trigger anxiety. Whether it's important to you because it has memories that you cherish, or it's important to you because it is part of your identity, the threat of the loss of stuff can promote anxiety in a lot of people. But what is anxiety? Anxiety is really a lot more simple than people make it out to be. It's an emotion that's designed to motivate you to action. It's part of the fight or flight response. When your brain thinks that there might be a problem, just like a smoke alarm, when there might be a problem, it goes off and it dumps a bunch of energy into your system. So you have the ability to get up and see if there's a problem Just because it is triggered. Just because you feel anxious doesn't mean there's necessarily a threat. Your body is giving you the energy to get up and evaluate if there is a threat and then if there is the ability to flee from it. An example, you hear a strange sound at night and you get anxious or frightened. I know when I'm staying home alone. We live out in the country and we don't have a lot of neighbors nearby, so it can be a little bit anxiety provoking if I hear a weird noise outside. When that happens, do you hide under the covers and just worry about it? If so, how helpful is that? Then you become more hyper vigilant and you probably start hearing every other sound and you start hearing creaks and what have you. And your anxiety just continues to intensify and continues to spiral. And the interesting thing is that's your body continuing to dump glutamate and energy and things in an effort to try to motivate you to, hey, get up and see if there's a problem. So if there is, we can get the heck out of here. The more helpful response is to use that energy when you feel anxious to evaluate if it's a problem. In this context, at this time, or in this case, just a raccoon, what can you do? You can sit there, you hear this noise, you can go through, use that energy to go through the possibilities in your mind. It could be a raccoon, it could be the dog. Oh, my roommate just got home. That, that could be the noise that I heard. So that's part of it. You can evaluate the possibilities. And if that quells your anxiety, if you hit on that aha, and you're like, that's what it was. Okay, you know, end of story, you're done, and you can start to relax again if you go through the possibilities. Or maybe you don't. You hear that noise and you're like, I need to check it, check it out to see if there's a problem. Okay, so you're using your energy to get up and check it out. Or if you're like me, you call a friend and you're talking to your friend while you're getting up to check it out because you don't want to do it by yourself. But if you're home alone, you got to figure out how to make that work. Other examples that trigger anxiety for people, maybe their significant other or their best friend is just Acting weird. So they're concerned that that person is angry with them. They're fearing abandonment, they're fearing rejection. They don't know what's going on. There's just this unsettled feeling in the pit of their stomach. Maybe it's not overwhelming anxiety, but it is annoying feeling. Or, and my least favorite one, if your boss summons you to their office, you know, we need to talk. That always stresses me out with my other boss, with the boss that I worked with for 14 years. Most of the time, if he called you into his office, there was a problem. He was sort of a no news is good news kind of guy. So when he would summon you to his office, it was probably not going to be a pleasant situation. So whenever future bosses summon me to their office, I recall those past experiences and automatically it triggers my anxiety. Because of the unknown. I don't know what might be going on, but my past experiences in similar situations have been unpleasant. Now, it's important, and we're going to talk about this more in a minute, to use the current context at this time. In this context at this time, with this boss, does that necessarily mean that there's a problem? Future bosses may call you into their office because they have a project or something they want you to do, and it may not be a no news is good news sort of situation. So anxiety is worry is fear, whatever word you want to put on it, it's a response to a perceived threat or stressor. When your body thinks that there's a stressor, and remember I said it's like the smoke alarm, it doesn't mean there is one, it means there might be one. Just like the smoke alarm goes off when there's smoke, doesn't necessarily mean there's a fire. Cortisol, your stress hormone, is dumped. Glutamate, one of your main excitatory hormones is neurotransmitters, is dumped. When cortisol and glutamate are coursing through your system, you are in fight or flight mode. A lot of times you have what we call tunnel vision. You're not designed to be using higher order reasoning and thinking. At this point point in time, you are supposed to be evaluating if there's a threat and if so, getting the heck out of there. So your thinking is going to be somewhat impaired and often somewhat rigid. You're not often when you're in an anxiety state, when you're in an anxious state, you're often not going to see all of your options because your brain is just saying this. Not time to think, just get me to safety. Norepinephrine and dopamine are also secreted. And I know you may think of dopamine as the pleasure chemical, but it's really your perseverance chemical. So your body dumps norepinephrine to help you stay focused on the task at hand. And dopamine to keep you wanting to move away from the threat. Your body also dumps blood sugar and fatty acids. So if you've got diabetes, this is not a good thing because all of a sudden your blood sugar is going way up. But blood sugar is designed for the short fight. Just like when you eat sugar, sugar you can have a spike and then a crash. Blood sugar doesn't last for long. The fatty acids are released from your liver for the long fight in case there is a problem. You've got this reserve energy, this highly dense energy that you can pull from for the marathon if it's not just a quick sprint. The stress response unfortunately often leads to emotional reasoning and memories of other similar situations. When you have that stress response, you feel anxious. And a lot of people have always reacted this way. When they feel feel anxious, they think I fear, therefore I am in danger. And I'm kind of modifying Descartes statement. But it's important to recognize that emotional reasoning is not fact based reasoning. I fear therefore there might be a problem is a more effective statement. However, if you've always grown up thinking I'm scared, therefore there must be something to be scared about, guess what? You're gonna find something to be scared about. You're going to see the threats in the environment. Well, all of that gets encoded and every time that happens you encode more. And every time that happens after that you call on those emotion based schema, those emotion based expectations for what's going to happen instead of fact based ones. Therefore, in addressing anxiety, one of the most important things is to be able to recognize the feeling for what it is. It's designed to get you to move, to take action, to see if there is a threat and then use facts in the present context to see if there is a threat and if so, what to do about it. What is the impact of anxiety? I already mentioned that anxiety. When you're in that fight or flight state, it's going to impact your ability to think clearly. But let's go through all of the things when people are anxious. The gastrointestinal system is not in rest and digest, it is in fight or fleet. So the body says, hey, let's get rid of some of that stuff. So everything speeds up, which is why a lot of people get stomach cramps or GI distress, like, say, when they get anxious. Unfortunately, when that happens, you're also not making use of the food that you've eaten, or at least not nearly as efficiently, because it's not getting digested and processed effectively. When people experience anxiety, they experience increases in muscle tension, which can create increases in pain. They may also experience increases in pain because of changes in neurotransmitter levels. When people are anxious, especially if they're persistently anxious, not just, I had an anxiety moment during the day, but if they're anxious a lot of the time, it often keeps them from being able to effectively wind down and go to sleep. It keeps their cortisol levels high, which disrupts their circadian rhythms and alters the levels of hormones and neurotransmitters so they don't get good sleep, which contributes to low energy and fatigue. But just being stressed out and tense all the time also drains your energy. And when people are anxious, they are what we call hyper vigilant. They're more easily startled. And think about how much energy it takes when you're startled. You know you have that rush all of a sudden, and it can be exhausting. When you are constantly scanning, you have difficulty relaxing, and you're startling a whole lot more throughout the day, affectively or emotionally. People with anxiety tend to be more irritable. And it makes sense if you're worried. If you are in the state where you feel like there's a threat going on. If you feel out of control, then it's more likely that you are going to respond with irritability to other things that come your way because you're already feeling threatened and you're like, I can't deal with anything else. Depression is not uncommon in people with anxiety because you can only be anxious for so long before you run out of gas, before you've gone so long without good sleep, before your energy has been so far drained that you just become hopeless and helpless. People also feel guilt when they feel anxious. They may feel guilty that they are anxious and not able to do the things they want to do the way they want to do them. They may experience anger and resentment at other people for making them anxious. You didn't call when you said you would. That triggered my anxiety. Therefore I'm anxious, angry with you. Cognitively, it promotes a sense of pessimism and negativity when you're anxious. When you're in fight or flight, your Brain is pre programmed to notice the threats in the environment and not pay attention to the positive things. So you tend to get a more skewed perspective of the world, which promotes pessimism. Your memory is often impaired thanks to that glutamate. Your brain actually does not encode memories nearly as effectively in the moment. And then because you're not getting good quality sleep, you're not going through those phases of sleep where your memories get effectively encoded into your into your brain. Problem solving and decision making also go out the window when you're anxious. The more anxious you are, the more difficult it is often to see the options for problem solving and to make a decision. Because you're second guessing, you become anxious about what's the right decision. So anxiety promotes anxiety interpersonally in your relationships. Anxiety often impacts your self esteem because you don't want to be anxious all the time and you get frustrated or you fear rejection and and you create a lot of negative self statements. It can result in impatience with other people because you don't have enough energy to deal with your own anxiety right now. You can't break free from your own anxiety right now. You ain't got enough time or energy for their drama. You may experience isolation sometimes by choice because you just can't tolerate any more input. You're already overwhelmed or not by choice because other people get exhausted being around your anxiety. So they start to distance themselves because they don't know how to help you. But they also can't seem to figure out how to connect with you in a meaningful way. And finally, you may have an inability to create secure attachments when you're anxious. It's really hard to be emotionally available to other people and that is so necessary for creating secure attachments. To be able to empathize, to be able to respond consistently to their needs and not just be completely overwhelmed trying to figure out how to manage your own needs. Anxiety is emotion that's designed to move you to action. It's not like wine, it does not get better with age, the longer you hold it. Anxiety is based on your belief about whether there's a threat based on prior experiences. But it's important to remember to evaluate whether the situation is a threat in this context. This time. If there is a threat, use the energy that's being dumped into your system to address it. Otherwise your body's going to continue to dump energy until you're just plumb out of gas and that will end up leading to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and depression.