What exactly is anxiety?

Like most words, it means different things to different people. People may use the term to refer to an emotional quality akin to worry, or to physical symptoms such as feeling jittery or queasy, or having sweaty palms or shortness of breath. People may talk about having anxious thoughts.

 Everyone experiences anxiety in one or all the above forms; it’s a normal response to a variety of stressors. You might think of it as a common response to stress that can become uncommon. When anxiety becomes atypical, whether it qualifies as a mental health diagnosis or doesn’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis but still disrupts one’s life, it will manifest in the following ways:

• excessive worry (this term is vague, of course, because what defines excess?)

• feelings of agitation (the body preparing for danger)

• restlessness (especially prevalent in children, the desire to mobilize)

• easily fatigued (whether due to insomnia or muscle tension, a common symptom of anxiety, but not typically the only symptom)

• difficulty concentrating (again, typically not appearing by itself, but reflective of the interruption in memory or cognitive performance)

• irritability (especially when anxiety is peaking)

• muscle tension (interestingly, there’s a high correlation between reducing muscle tension and reducing anxiety)

• insomnia (both falling and staying asleep)

• panic attacks (extreme feelings of fear accompanied by physical symptoms like rapid heartbeat or chest tightness/difficulty breathing)

• avoiding social situations (avoiding social events out of fear of judgment or embarrassment)

• irrational fears (phobias that interfere with everyday functioning)

In mental health treatment, typically we regard anxious thoughts as drivers of the associated symptoms and feeling states. It might start out as perseverating on a daunting task, which generates fear or worry, which leads to dry mouth, increased sweat, and a pounding heart, which in turn support thoughts of impending doom and a sense of urgency, which increase physical and emotional symptoms in a negative cycle.

We might even say the more anxious we feel, the less able we are to access internal resources that might help us overcome the original stressful situation. It is, in one sense, too successful a response to keeping us safe or mobilizing us for meeting a dangerous situation because instead of helping us prepare, it paralyzes us.

I was recently reading about awe and discovered some interesting parallels between awe and anxiety. Each experience is framed by novelty, an excitatory biological response, and a sense of something being greater than one’s ability to handle or comprehend.

Given this, we could hypothesize that anxiety is maladaptive awe. Next time you’re feeling anxious, try reframing the experience as one of awe at the prospect of engaging in a new and unpredictable adventure. I’m not suggesting this is a surefire solution to managing anxiety, rather that these two experiences do share some psychobiological features. The takeaway is that anxiety, outside of its diagnostic features, is already being defined in broad brushstrokes. It may be useful to expand our definition of anxiety even further.