What Causes Anxiety

Lots of people who experience anxiety often ask themselves what causes anxiety. To them the anxiety seems to be running on autopilot in the back of the mind. Sometimes this anxiety can become more powerful and can give rise to persistent worrying and apprehension, obsessions and compulsions, phobias, panic attacks and depression.

Many people just feel worn out searching through books and websites looking for get well quick ideas, answers and solutions.

After all this research many people find that it is not about examining a specific anxiety disorder but more about understanding and eliminating what underlies all of them. They eventually discover that most anxiety disorders can be weakened and stopped in pretty much the same way.

It is important to realize what causes anxiety tends to have little to do with an illness or disease. It can be more the fact that it is a learned behavior that has become an automatic way of acting and behaving.

Some people may think that they need to increase their intelligence levels to overcome anxiety. However, many people who are intelligent experience anxiety, have negative self talk and unwanted behaviors and feelings and yet they feel powerless to stop them.

Typically, most anxiety related problems reveal to us how we have learned to cope with our life experiences. The more you behave in a certain way, whether positive or negative, the stronger it grows and the more automatic the behavior tends to become.

What causes anxiety to occur in our lives is we learn a behavior and then the natural mind and body system (which has evolved over millions of years) serves its survival function by preparing our body for action and making us more alert so that we are ready to fight or flight. The natural mind body system tends to prepare us for action by making us feel uncomfortable.

A behavior develops from what we call association. This means that when you react a certain way or give a certain meaning to a situation, event or stimulus, your mind associates this situation with certain feelings and meanings. These feelings and meanings then reside into the unconscious mind after a while to then become an automatic behavior or response.

Once the natural survival mechanism of the mind and body is instructed to see a certain situation in a certain perspective, the natural processes of the mind and body will serve to protect you and try to get you to take an action of some sort by making you feel uncomfortable.

You have probably experienced anxiety by just thinking about a situation without being in the situation for real. This shows you that you are reacting to the meaning you gave the event instead of reacting to the actual event itself.

It is important to realize that if you can learn something then you can unlearn it and replace it with something new, positive and productive.  If you are thinking ‘It’s just the way I am’, think again. You can re-program your mind by associating better feelings, meaning and beliefs to the event or situation.

As strange as it may sound, you must not bring a negative emotion towards yourself for experiencing anxiety. This only exacerbates the issue even more. You must respect your anxiety and the purpose it serves. By respecting and bringing no judgement to having anxiety, you weaken its power even more.

Key points about what causes anxiety:

Anxiety is usually about the future. Often times anxiety can result from not confronting a situation, whether big or small.

It can be about a specific situation or it can be a vague feeling where the cause is difficult to identify.

We can become anxious while in a pleasant situation by fearing something will go wrong (sometimes called paradise syndrome).

Anxiety can either be about a real event forthcoming in the future (like an operation) or it can come from our imagination where there is very little real danger.

If you have experienced anxiety that seems to be senseless then it is very likely a learned behavior that your mind is just playing out like an old recording. You can re-program your mind to play out a new behavior.