Anxiety is a natural response of the organism to stressful situations that can be important. It has a biological function, which is adaptive and, in some cases, helps us to focus on what is important.
When anxiety rises to a level in which it no longer helps us to focus, but produces adverse effects (mental block, inability to make decisions, lack of concentration or appearance of physical symptoms such as muscle tension, headache, restlessness, difficulty sleeping, gastrointestinal problems), then it is an anxiety that has gone from being useful and productive for us to becoming a pathological and problematic anxiety.
Factors that favor anxiety
There are 3 main factors that favor anxiety.
The first factor is the genetic predisposition towards anxiety. There are people who are more predisposed, just like any other disease. This does not mean that it is hereditary, but there is more vulnerability if you come from a family with many cases of anxiety. It is more likely that you will end up developing, if other factors come together, an anxiety disorder.
The second important factor is an educational or learned factor: how we have been brought up. Whether we have been brought up from a more relaxed, adaptive approach, with more tolerance for uncertainty, or whether we have been brought up from fear, in an overly protective way, that from childhood we are told to be wary of supposedly dangerous things. This marks the way we think about the world, as we develop the perception that the world is full of threats. As a result, catastrophic thinking develops. What is bad we tend to label as catastrophic in an excessively negative way.
And the third factor consists of personal experiences. Sometimes, the person lives situations of great stress, demands, extreme situations, harassment at work, school bullying, physical aggression, if he has been subjected to much economic stress, job loss, family problems … These types of situations, which are real negative experiences, can be the trigger of an anxiety disorder when you already have some of the previous two factors.
How to treat anxiety
There are two therapeutic approaches that science has shown to work. One is pharmacological therapy, through two major types of medications: antidepressants, which reduce anxiety, and anxiolytic medications. This route usually works quite well.
The other therapeutic approach is cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. This therapeutic approach aims, on the one hand, to teach people to change the way they think about anxiety, to change the way they take things so that they are less dramatic and less catastrophic. And, on the other hand, to teach people to face situations, which normally provoke anxiety or fear, in a calmer way without avoiding them, but to expose themselves to them in order to get used to them and to make them less and less anxious.
Guidelines for learning to control anxiety
On the one hand, it is advisable not to avoid anything that scares the person. The more you avoid, the more you feed anxiety. This is a basic idea that should be transmitted to people suffering from anxiety.
On the other hand, it is important to identify how those situations that may be objectively negative, annoying, problematic or even painful, but which are not terrible, are taken in a dramatic or catastrophic way. They are not the worst thing that can happen to us in life.