“I know people who went to law school and wanted to pursue a career in criminal law but were afraid to be in front of a courtroom,” says Albano. People with big dreams may sometimes settle for smaller ones because their anxiety holds them back. People with an airplane phobia may, similarly, limit their travel to only places they can drive. “But if you’re avoiding going to your doctor at all because of it, that’s a problem.” “You may dread getting a medical test because of what you could learn,” says Albano. Anxieties start to strip away the things that do. We all avoid things we fear or dislike: you could go your whole life without roller coasters or cilantro or horror movies. Left untreated, those anxieties can go on for months and years. Sometimes, especially in the case of OCD, it takes just a single traumatic event - a genuinely embarrassing social moment, say, or a legitimate medical scare - for the brain to establish a fixed fear. Ditto an obsessive-compulsive fear of disease or a panic over separation or loss. Once you’ve decided that people at parties are probably judging you, your brain may lock that lesson in and pretty soon generalize it to any social encounter. But the anxious brain sometimes learns the wrong things and has an awfully hard time unlearning them. “In the context of a disorder, however, you might start to feel the same thing the moment you walk into the office or a party.” Your panic is persistentĪn anxious brain, like a non-anxious brain, is always learning. “If you suddenly have to slam on your brakes and swerve to avoid a collision, that pounding heart and rapid breath you feel for a few minutes after is a form of panic attack,” says psychologist Anne Marie Albano, director of Columbia University’s Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. In some cases, the emotions become so severe they lead to a panic attack, a sort of weaponized anxiety that hits fast and hard and includes such symptoms as dizziness, rapid heart rate, depersonalization or out-of-body experience and a fear of losing control or dying. “There are students who will vomit in the days leading up to a test.” “Anxiety will prevent people from sleeping they’ll find themselves crying over it,” says psychologist Golda Ginsburg, professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and a specialist in child and adolescent mental health. There is no blood test or brain scan that can conclusively diagnose any of them, but here are four signs that may point to trouble. The most common recognized anxiety disorders include general anxiety disorder, agoraphobia (or fear of being in public situations you can’t escape), social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), specific phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and separation anxiety disorder. The cerebral cortex can get flummoxed trying to sort real risks from exaggerated ones: Doorknobs do carry germs, so how do you know the one you touched didn’t have something deadly? People do suffer social humiliation at parties or while giving speeches how do you know you won’t be one of them? Sometimes, however, the alarm gets stuck. The job of determining whether it is or not goes to the cerebral cortex, which sorts things through more coolly and either responds to the threat or shuts down the siren the amygdala has set off.
The fear you experience from a menacing stranger and the fear you experience from a scary movie set off the same amygdala alarms, and do it within 20 milliseconds - a very good thing if the danger is real. The job of doing that is actually handled by two brain regions: the amygdala, situated deep in the brain’s basement, and the higher, more complex cerebral cortex.Īs befits its humble location, the amygdala processes very basic emotions - fear, anger, guilt, envy - and handles them quickly and unthinkingly. It’s a menacing world out there, and your brain needs a way to grab your attention when you’re stumbling into danger. Anxiety may, by definition, feel bad, but that doesn’t mean it therefore is bad.