Understanding the Anxiety Response

Hey, how are you doing!? Feeling a bit anxious. We all are! This is going to be, I think, relatively short and sweet but critical. As it is really important to understand the underlying dynamic of our body and how it affects our mind. So let’s just jump right in. It is going to be a long and in a story format so take your reading glasses with you.

Think like a day in the life of a caveman. I bring us back to caveman days because this is where our biology primarily evolved, and in fact, it evolved in a very clever way to support two different modes of being. So a lot of time, caveman people would resort to the cave, to the tribe, to the group because that’s where the security was. So very often every evening in the dark because we don’t have very good sensory systems for dealing with the dark, so we would certainly go back to our cave at night. But other times too, we would spend time there and those would be times of relaxation and specifically in terms of our biological machinery. Those are times when our body worries about doing things like taking the nutrients we have consumed and feeding them to our body, giving our body everything it needs to be physically strong, dealing with getting rid of waste. So basically digestion processes that you can really see is aimed at long-term survival. Keeping our body strong so that we can survive for a good period of years into the future. So I think that’s like long-term maintenance on your house. But of course, sooner or later, the caveman as to go and get some of this food to digest, and so they have to leave the safety of their cave environment and go out into the wild. By the way, most of the time there they were literally gathering berries, and gathering easy food that was there to get. But of course, occasionally, if there was an opportunity to hunt food, they would do that as well. But now imagine this caveman doing his thing, harvesting food however he could and suddenly, if we can imagine two scenarios perhaps a predator suddenly appears and this person’s life is in danger or potentially an opportunity. Perhaps some prey animal is observed. In both of these situations a different mode of being kicks in. A different part of our machinery, and I’ll introduce it to you formally in a moment, is the “Sympathetic Nervous System”. But for now, think of it as your short-term survival system. So this really kicks in especially when we’re under threat and it energizes our body. It is what we’re going to call our fight-or-flight system because that’s what it does and I want to emphasize this. When it kicks in, it kicks in with an imperative. It’s going to strengthen yourself. It’s going to give yourself all these resources to deal with the threat and it wants you to do one of two things with that threat. It wants you either to take it on and fight it or it wants you to run away, flee from it, and that’s the imperative, and that’s why it’s giving you the strength or the energy to do those two things. So caveman would spend a lot of time relaxing in that relaxation digestion mode, but occasionally would get flipped into this action mode.

So if we actually talk about this as terms of what’s happening with your machinery, well, there is a part of your brain called the amygdala. It does not look like a little gear, little gear is just making the machine analogy a little more strong. But there’s a little biological master called the amygdala and it is the closest you can come to that thing that some of us call the spider-sense if you watch Spider-Man, it basically is your early warning system and it is always, as input comes into our brain from all of our senses, it is essentially scanning that input for threat, and if it sees threat, especially serious threat, then it engages the hippocampus and you see that regulates memory and emotions. Notice also, by the way, the amygdala stores memories of the event and actually stores the memory of just before the event. This is where post-traumatic stress can come from, but let’s leave that aside for now. The amygdala kicks in, it says the threat is present. The hippocampus produces an emotional reaction to that, and the prefrontal cortex gets there too, but sometimes slow. In fact, a lot of blood drains from your prefrontal cortex to the more primitive parts of the brain when the system gets engage, because it’s not a time for thought, it’s the time for action, and that’s when your brain is gearing you up for this action. So when this all kicks in, all these hormones are released in our body as well. So this is what’s happening at the brain level.

But at the body level, these are the two modes we talked about. So parasympathetic is the relaxation mode. Sympathetic is the deal with threat now mode. When you see, when it gets triggered, some people almost think of it as like a light switch, which is probably a little oversimplified, but I think for our needs its good, where you can imagine you’re sitting on the couch chilling out at the end of the day and in that case, our parasympathetic system is controlling your body. So this is the system that it’s connected to the brain, but it controls what goes on in all of your organs especially. That’s why you see your organs laid out here, but also you see eyeball and stuff. But mostly these are internal organs. So it’s controlling what’s going on with these internal organs, and when you’re relaxed, the primary goal is digestion, is long-term survival. So we’ll see things like stimulates saliva, you get more saliva in your mouth because that helps you digest food and in fact, eating can kick this system in, and that’s one of the reasons why we tend to eat when we’re stressed. It’s a way of relaxing. Literally, once we put food in our mouths, it does stimulate this parasympathetic system and get it to kick in a little bit. Notice the heart rate slows down, breathing slows down, the stomach becomes more active, the gallbladder becomes more active, the intestines become more active, etc. So this is again about processing the food, getting the nutrients to the body, extracting the waste, and getting rid of the waste. But the amygdala gets triggered, we sense danger, we sense a threat, and now this system takes over. Notice that it does almost the opposite of everything there, even with the eyes, by the way, let’s just talk about the eyes for a second. When you’re relaxed, your pupils are constricted. Your pupils control how much light is coming in from the environment. So when you’re relaxed, you can think of it as you’re not really processing the environment that deeply, you are more likely to be just in your head thinking about whatever. But you hear that predator and suddenly your pupils open up. Your brain wants more input from your environment, what the heck is out there? So suddenly it’s becoming more in tuned to the environment. It shuts down digestion. It says, forget about digestion, that’s not important right now. So saliva is inhibited, the stomach is inhibited, the gallbladder is inhibited, intestines are inhibited. So that’s all about, I don’t care about digestion right now. We can do that later when we’re relaxed again. What I do care about is survival, and so heart rate increases. Lung, it says relax, but really you start to breathe much more heavily. So you heart increases in rate, your breathing increases in frequency. Why? This is pumping oxygen to all your muscles and your muscles need oxygen to be at their optimal. It gives your muscles at their best by putting all the oxygen to them. Notice also, secrete epinephrine and norepinephrine. These give you energy, but they also make you a little more numb to pain, which is good because you going to go, maybe go fight something and if you go fight something, best and not be too worried about pain at the time. You can worry about that later. So this is what the body is doing.

This is anxiety

This is why you feel energized. This is why you maybe feel like your heart rate is beating faster and maybe your mouth is a little dry. In fact, maybe your whole digestive process might not be working as well these days as it did in the past. Because this sympathetic nervous system is now awake and active more than it should be. Why? Because this threat is there and it’s hanging around, and so when we say anxiety, what we really mean is the sympathetic nervous system is engaged. So again, it’s a basic part of our machinery that we can learn to control. We going to get there, but for now, I want you critically to understand that distinction between long-term survival and relaxation, versus short-term survival and this fight-or-flight system, and that’s what we’re dealing with now. Now there’s a difference, of course, and this is a really important difference. What I mean by difference, the difference between a predator stepping out in front of us and COVID-19. They are both threats, but the predator tends to be what we would call acute short-term threat. This is really what our system was developed to handle. There’s something there, I have to do something now and you do something. With COVID the threat is chronic, it’s what we call chronic. It’s there all the time. It’s just hanging out. Not only is it chronic, it’s undefined, it’s ambiguous, and it’s not even just the virus. It’s the economic impact of the virus, it’s the lifestyle changes, it’s the isolation, it’s the not being able to hug people we would like to hug, that thing is all feeding into this threat system, and what that results in is a couple of things. We cannot run away from COVID. I guarantee you, if there were places on the planet where this just wasn’t getting to and couldn’t survive, a lot of us would run there. But we know of no such place. So this system now is then telling, well, fight and that’s what I hope I’m going to tell you to do here that we can fight. There are things we can do and that we need to be doing to respect this anxiety system, but we also need to control the anxiety system itself. So yeah, this chronic threat is a whole different dynamic and it makes it all a little scarier. But still we all have to handle this and handle ourselves in this chronic time and control ourselves. And this is the only win situation for us for now.