How to Overcome Excessive Anxiety

Anxiety is a widespread phenomenon in our society. Today I want to comment on some of the origins of excessive or exaggerated anxiety.

First, let’s look at what excessive anxiety is. Excessive or exaggerated anxiety is a feeling, a sense of anguish, with or without a feeling of tightness in the chest. It’s a restlessness, a feeling of distress, a lack of serenity. The feeling of anxiety can be understood as a sign of the presence of unacceptable thoughts, feelings and desires in a person’s unconscious.

When we are thinking or when thoughts or feelings and desires that are difficult for you to accept want to surface in your consciousness, your mind creates a defense to avoid this, to escape thinking about the emotional pain. This defense can be many things. For example, it could be a psychosomatic symptom in which some change appears in the body.

It could be an obsession with anything – money, fame, sex, shopping, drugs, romance. But when the mind fails to build a defense mechanism to keep these unacceptable thoughts, feelings and desires out of its consciousness, the anxiety gets worse. And it can appear as anxiety even with distress, or as a phobia, which is exaggerated fear, or it can appear as a panic attack, as well as other manifestations.

So, one way of looking at excessive anxiety is that it can be a manifestation of an existing conflict, because on the one hand your mind wants to bring things into your consciousness for you to think about, and on the other hand there is a repression of this perception.

Anxiety arises because you don’t allow some truth to appear in your conscious mind. Unpleasant anxiety comes about because you are unable, at that moment, to look at the basic causes of your conflicts. You may believe that your exaggerated anxiety is linked to a conscious fear of something. For example, an exaggerated fear of an insect.

But this fear masks or disguises a deeper concern or more complex conflict. Many people suffer from anxiety without having any idea why they are anxious. It’s not a question of intelligence, but of the emotional possibility of being able to see or not being able to see the cause of the anxiety. We achieve emotional healing not when we want to, but when we can, when we are ready.

The task of psychotherapy in the analytical approach, also called psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is precisely to help people understand the root causes of their excessive anxiety or other suffering. Psychotherapy is work with a clinical psychologist, aimed at relieving, improving or curing emotional or psychological suffering.

Some people suffer a lot from anxiety because they can’t live up to an internal standard of perfect moral behavior. When a child lives in a family where the parents are too strict and demanding and who set a super-perfect standard of behavior, the child can’t reach that standard, not because he or she is bad, dumb or rebellious, but because the exaggerated target is perfectionist.

And because of the fear of losing their parents’ love or approval, the child feels anxious and may demand of themselves what isn’t right for them. And children can experience an equally painful anxiety, called separation anxiety, in which there is a fear not only of losing their parents’ love, but also of losing their parents through divorce, separation or death.

Another type of anxiety is known as disintegration anxiety, which is when you fear losing your identity, your selfie, your very self. This can occur in a variety of circumstances, such as living in a state of self-denial to try to please others and ending up confused about who you are or what you want and don’t want.

Many people think that once a child has survived a period of childhood during which there was a lot of suffering in the family, which generated a lot of anxiety in the child, they will no longer have a problem with anxiety. But this is not true. The conflicts of the past that produced anxiety will be resolved when these conflicts are dealt with and worked on. Each person can have a mixture of anxiety, whether it’s separation anxiety, disintegration anxiety or something else.

It seems that some people are born more prone to anxiety and we call this trait anxiety. Perhaps some genetic factor contributes to this. The scientist Lesch and colleagues found that people with a shorter version of the serotonin transporter gene may have greater anxiety linked to a neurotic temperament than those with a longer version of this gene.¹⁾Lesch, K.P., Bengel, D., Heils, A., Sabol, S.Z., Greenberg, B.D., Petri, S., Benjamin, J., Müller, C.R., Hamer, D.H., & Murphy, D.L. (1996). Association of anxiety-related traits with a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region. Science, 274(5292), 1527-1531.

On the other hand, Professor Gabbard, professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York and Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, puts it this way:

Individuals with higher anxiety may be better equipped to survive the threats in their environment than those who are less worried.²⁾Gabbard, Glen O. Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice. 5th Edition. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2014. ISBN: 978-1585624430

Dr. Garbbard comments that in a study of twins, which aimed to investigate genetic and environmental risk factors for anxiety disorders, it was found that genes favored two large groups of emotional suffering: one related to panic attacks and generalized anxiety and the other to more specific phobias.

People may joke about other people’s anxiety, but scientific studies have shown that anxiety that persists and does not provide relief is a risk factor for thinking about suicide and trying to kill oneself. For this reason, people who are suffering from excessive anxiety need professional help.

It’s important to understand that anxiety can be adaptive or maladaptive. In other words, some people with anxiety learn to deal with it and become very creative. That’s why we shouldn’t think that for any type of anxiety, the person has to take medication to see if it decreases. Some anxiety serves an adaptive function to warn the individual about a dangerous situation which can then be managed in order to avoid the danger.

As I’ve already mentioned here, over-anxiety is the red light on your car’s dashboard that tells you that you need to do something to fix the fault that caused the red light to come on. But if you break the bulb of the red light with a hammer, thinking that everything will be fine, that’s a danger, because the problem that caused the red light to come on will continue.

In other words, if you have conflicts that need to be resolved in your relationships with other people and with yourself, you can’t just take medication and do nothing about it. Medicines, no matter how good they are, even if they are indicated for temporary use, will not eliminate the need for you to seek solutions to your emotional suffering that produces excessive anxiety.

A panic attack lasts only a few minutes, with symptoms such as a feeling of breathlessness, very intense distress, dizziness, tachycardia or rapid heartbeat, trembling, sweating, a feeling that you are going to lose your mind or that you are going to die, usually with the sensation that you are having a heart attack.

If you’re having a panic attack with a strong and frequent feeling that you’re going to die of a heart attack or stroke, you should see a cardiologist to check for cardiovascular disease. If the consultation with the heart specialist reveals that there is no physical heart disease, this will be an important factor in helping to combat the catastrophic thoughts that encourage panic attacks.

Many people who have a panic attack also have what we call agoraphobia, which basically means fear of open spaces, but which is an excessive fear of being in a place or situation where it is difficult to leave or escape or face or fear of being in a very embarrassing situation. People with a panic attack may be too afraid to get into an elevator, for example, or they may go into a state of anxiety if they are in a traffic jam, or in an enclosed space such as a theater or cinema.

Because panic attacks can occur repeatedly, many people end up developing a type of anticipatory anxiety, which means they become extremely worried about when and where the next panic attack will occur. This fear of having another crisis means that the person suffering from the panic attack ends up avoiding leaving the house or only goes out if someone is with them, and even then they are still afraid of closed places and crowds.

People who develop panic attacks may have what we call trait anxiety, which is different from state anxiety. When a person has state anxiety, they feel more anxious than normal just for a while. It’s something limited. For example, when they have an interview for a new job or when they take a practical test to get their driver’s license or when they take an entrance exam.

Once the stress-producing event has passed, the anxiety subsides and returns to normal. This is the case for people with state anxiety. Now, in people with trait anxiety, as the name implies, they have a trait of anxiety, perhaps since they were a child, and through emotionally traumatic situations that have occurred throughout their lives, they combine the tendency towards anxiety with the anxiety produced by the traumas, which can lead to panic attacks.

Many who suffer from panic attacks may experience situations full of stressors, such as people around them, in the family or at work, who place very high expectations on them to resolve a situation. For example, a boss at work may demand a task of the person or that they have to meet certain production targets, which is excessive for them. This can increase anxiety and lead to a panic attack.

It’s common in the history of people with panic attacks to find that throughout their childhood there were situations in which their attachment to their father or mother or another important figure was threatened. In other words, they felt that the attachment could be broken with one of these affectively important people.

And other panic-stricken individuals also had a feeling that their parents were very difficult, critical, very demanding, explosive, creating a lot of anxiety in their relationship with them. There are also some mothers who are very anxious and can’t calm their baby down, because they themselves can’t calm down. This leads to anxiety in the child, which can later contribute to panic attacks.

Other individuals with panic disorder had a relationship with their parents in which they didn’t feel welcome and it was difficult for them to express their anger, because they were immediately restrained by their parents from talking about their frustrations.

Dr. Gabbard comments that studies have shown that patients with panic disorder had a greater number of stressful events in their lives, particularly losses in the months prior to the onset of panic disorder, when compared to people without so many traumas. He cites a scientific study of 118 pairs of twins, in which panic disorder was very strongly linked to the separation or death of parents. Many people with panic attacks have also experienced early separation from their mothers.

There is a theory that people with panic attacks may have a neurophysiological weakness, i.e. something in their brain that doesn’t work properly and this makes it easier for them to have attacks when stressful events occur in their lives. One researcher, Kagan and colleagues, found that some children are already born with an inhibited temperament. This makes them easily frightened by anything that is foreign to their environment.³⁾Kagan, J., Reznick, J. S., & Snidman, N. (1988). Biological bases of childhood shyness. Science, 240(4849), 167-171.

In order to overcome their fear, they tend to become too attached to their parents. But as they are not available all the time, anger can arise and this may lead to a conflict between needing their parents’ support and being angry with them, which can lead to a panic attack later on.

For this reason, it is common for people with panic attacks to have a great fear of separation from people who are affectionately connected to them, and there is usually a very exaggerated emotional bond with these people. Thus, the idea of separation from these figures creates terror in these individuals who end up panicking. They have not yet learned how to live with healthy emotional independence.

Many people with panic attacks have been victims of childhood sexual abuse. And Dr. Gabbard from Baylor University explains that since childhood trauma interferes with a child’s attachment to their parents, sexual abuse could explain some of the difficulties that people with panic disorder have in feeling safe with the significant people in their lives.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who has a panic attack was sexually abused in childhood – the majority were not. If you suffer from a panic attack or if you know someone who does, treatment should be carried out by a psychiatrist who can temporarily prescribe medication to relieve the excessive anxiety and it will be necessary to seek psychotherapy treatment with a psychologist to learn about the causes of this health problem and to be helped to develop coping strategies for the excessive anxiety.

Here’s my advice: don’t be afraid to seek professional help and don’t put it off so that your quality of life can improve. People suffering from excessive anxiety can get better, they can learn to deal with it in a healthy way and they can stop having panic attacks or other manifestations of exaggerated anxiety.