Dr. Don Wood argues that anxiety is a symptom—not evidence of a broken mind—and commonly treated with medication that only addresses symptoms. He explains anxiety as arising from fear (especially fear of the future and uncertainty) often rooted in past traumatic or abandonment experiences, and recommends addressing root causes rather than only using medication.
Chapters
Anxiety and stress was overwhelming, and the only answer was medication. I'm not surprised when you told me that you thought medication was the only answer to your anxiety. A lot of people feel that way. Well, the first thing I want to tell you is anxiety is not the sign of a broken mind. A lot of people feel like there's something wrong with them. What I always talk to them about is what I'll say is anxiety is the symptom. It's actually not the problem, but everybody treats the symptom. And so how they treat symptoms is generally with medication. And the medication can temporarily help, but it's not getting to the root of the problem. So the idea is to understand what is anxiety, really? What is anxiety? Anxiety comes from fear, fear of the future, fear of something happening now. Why would your mind get anxious? Why would it be fearful? Something. Does it really make sense? It does if you understand how the brain works. If you've had traumatic or disturbing events in your lifetime, that's where anxiety is going to come from. So I'm sure you probably had some trauma right when you were a child. A lot of people who have anxiety have had trauma from their childhood. Disturbing events can also fall into that. Abandonment issues can be something that could create anxiety. So let me explain how abandonment could create that. If you're a child and something happened, maybe a parent left you, or you got something happened with a divorce and you felt abandoned. Now, that may not have been what the result was supposed to be, but that abandonment feeling will continue to loop through your mind even into adulthood. So what's your mind going to do to protect you? It's going to try to plan for that happening again. And if you keep on planning for that to happen and you're looking for it, that's going to create fear. The number one fear for the human mind is uncertainty. So your mind has been uncertain about its future because of the past, because of experiences that you've had before that your mind is trying to figure out a way to stay away from, protect you from. Anxiety is a function of the brain, not a dysfunction of the brain. If your mind figures it can predict when something will happen or plan for something to happen, it can protect you. The biggest problem with anxiety is it goes from planning to predicting. So if you predict that somebody is going to call you back on Friday, that will make you feel safe. But what happens when they don't call you back on Friday? What just happened to the anxiety? It grows and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The planning went to predicting the predicting fails and it looks like something's really wrong. That's how your mind perceives it. There's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your mind. The key to resolving anxiety is to get to the root of the problem. Don't just treat the symptom that's not fixing the problem. And there it is.
