Is Anxiety Good Or Bad?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Is anxiety good or bad?

From a CBT perspective, anxiety has both positive and negative facets.

This begs the question: "What can be good, and even more useful in anxiety?"

Anxiety is a normal and vital response to danger.

First of all, when we sense danger, our brain instantly determines the worst-case scenario, and the body begins to prepare, dramatically releasing adrenaline to cope with this scenario.

There are three classic reactions to danger:

1. -Fight

2.-run away

3.-Freeze

When we feel anxiety, four systems instantly turn on:

Emotional, cognitive, physiological and behavioral. This rather complex reaction works very quickly and efficiently every day.

Example:

Mother stood in the subway with her little daughter. The train was moving in her direction. The mother had a quick image of how her daughter fell from the platform onto the tracks right in front of the train. She felt fear. The adrenaline level increased, the woman tensed, concentrated. She abruptly took her daughter by the hand, despite her protests, did not let go until the train reached a stop, and they were able to go inside the carriage.

Therefore, anxiety is a normal, largely subconscious process that regularly happens in the life of each of us.

When does anxiety become a problem?

When the normal response is exaggerated in the absence of a real threat.

Example: A mother has obsessive images and thoughts that her children will be offended on the street, so they do not let them walk alone and tries to carry them everywhere by car, constantly monitoring.

In this case, the level of danger is clearly exaggerated. And as a result, the mother psychologically traumatizes both herself and the child.

There are a huge number of alarm cycles. I will give two of them.

1. Trigger - Anticipated threat - Anxiety reaction - Successful overcoming of the reaction - reduction of anxiety level

Example: The student learned that the state. exams will be held 2 weeks earlier - the release of adrenaline - focusing thinking, an increase in the number of repetitions of tickets - the result - anxiety decreases.

2. Trigger - Anticipated threat - exaggerated anxious reaction - problematic coping reactions - creating a strategy that does not completely solve the problem - increasing anxiety - and again the foreseen threat. Here the circle closes.

Example: An anxious student learns that there will be testing soon - he considers it a threat, feels a high level of anxiety - he over-focuses on testing, the student's thinking is so overstretched that he cannot concentrate on his studies, the student gets a bad score and this keeps his conviction. that he is incompetent, the result is that the level of excitement also persists.

Friends, it is very important to understand that anxiety is normal. Anxiety has its own healthy and unhealthy cycles, and the systematics of work, which I tried to describe in this article. Analyze your anxiety. If you find yourself in a healthy anxiety cycle that you can deal with, that's good. If you find yourself in the second, negative anxiety cycle, and you see that it is difficult for you to cope with it, then contact a specialist.