Maybe you have found yourself flooded by anxiety, overwhelmed by an emotional response that seemed to come out of nowhere, or that felt out of proportion to whatever was actually in front of you. Why does that happen? Why do we get swamped by responses we do not understand and cannot seem to control, responses that feel exaggerated and irrational?
Anxiety can certainly feel beyond our control, and because of that, it can seem beyond our understanding as well. One way to make sense of it is that anxiety is a response from the body that was learned. It has a complex emotional history behind it, one that is rooted in your body, even though that is not obvious in the moment.
Here is another way to put it. Much of anxiety is shaped by experience. If all you had ever known was a life without threats, an environment that gave you no reason for stressful thoughts of any kind, there would be far less to give anxiety its charge. And when it shows up out of proportion to whatever is in front of you, that disproportion is itself a clue: there have been threats, or there are threats now, that are coming up in your mind and affecting your body. People also differ in how strongly they react to the same event. Two people can meet the same minor setback and one is flooded while the other hardly notices, so part of the work is understanding not just where anxiety comes from, but why it lands as intensely as it does. Understanding your anxiety, then, is a matter of getting a better handle on its causes, both in the present and in the past.
One of the most surprising things is how anxiety can be based on something you’re not even consciously aware of. For example, your body might still be stuck in an anxious state because you have something stressful coming up, even when you’re not thinking about it. I remember in my own experience, how I used to get stressed about exams, and would sometimes notice how stressed my body had been feeling even though I had not been thinking about the exam. Notice that in a case like this the body is not overreacting to nothing. It is tracking something real, a genuine event on the way, and doing it faster than the conscious mind could. So anxiety can have unconscious roots, and when coming to understand it, it’s important to look at the overall context to get the full picture. The body, in a way, is smart. Sometimes, it’s smarter than our minds, because it takes care of things without us having to think about it, and in that sense its reactions can be much faster. But, it’s also important to be aware of when our body’s automatic responses become exaggerated; then the mind has the power to create meaningful shifts in a better direction for your mental health.
When the present does not explain it
If your anxious response does not seem proportional to the situation in front of you, then part of the explanation might be rooted in some history of trauma. When there is nothing in the present that is enough on its own to account for how you feel, the past can usually supply the extra context, and show you how your body learned to respond so intensely to threats that seem small, at least as you picture them in your mind.
So consider trauma. Imagine that something you did not predict happened to you and caused you a lot of pain. This could be a single event, or many events over time: a simple trauma or a complex one, each of varying intensity.
A note on Trauma
Keep in mind that “trauma” can mean many things, and we can make a distinction between “big T” trauma and “little t” trauma. That way, we don’t have to deny our own experience, and can understand that a “little t” trauma, such as forgetting about a deadline at work, receiving subtle negative social feedback, or getting into a “harmless” car accident such as a fender-bender, can still be interpreted by the body as a highly significant event. Perhaps most significant of all is the influence of the imagination over anxiety; what can make a “little t” trauma seem so significant is what it means about us, about our environment, and about our lives. Even consider the experience of a break-up in a relationship that was going poorly in the first place. Maybe the break-up was for the better, maybe it didn’t happen on hostile terms, and yet, the message that was interpreted from it could be something like “I am unlovable”, “I will never find a partner that suits me.” And so, one way of thinking about trauma is that it is something quite subjective, and is just as much about the meaning that we attach to an event, as it is about the severity of the event itself. Rather than calling an event traumatic, we might say it was traumatic for them.
In this way, we may become more open to acknowledging the subjectivity of someone’s experience, and how a given event can be traumatic, even if we would not consider the same event traumatic for ourselves. It may be true that some people are more hardy, or resilient than others, and yet, we may all be more vulnerable to subtlety than is pleasant to admit. As such, we can perhaps begin to appreciate how some events may have been traumatic for ourselves, bothering us for a long time, yet because of their lack of overt, socially-approvable significance, we may discount the experience and consider it “irrelevant”. And there is another layer underneath the question of meaning: we simply come with different constitutions. Nervous systems differ in how reactive they are from the outset, and a more sensitive one will take a stronger imprint from the same event. So intensity has two sources that compound each other: how much an event came to mean, and how reactive the system was that received it. When we look with more nuance, what we first labeled as irrational or irrelevant can start to make more sense, and reveal a detailed history.
What the body learns
So considering trauma: what does the body take from something like that? Think about what it learns from a parent who has a bad day and beats their child. From the child’s perspective, punishment arrived for no reason or cause it can identify. Or consider a severe car accident — a driver speeds through a red light and hits you as you cross the intersection. In each of these cases, when the trauma happens, the body and the brain, on a primitive level, read a message about the environment and how safe it is. There is a belief that, even if it is never consciously formed, is still felt, held deep in the body’s response. It goes something like: I need to stay aware and alert, scanning for threats, because something bad may happen again, something I did not predict, something that may be undeserved and unfair.
A whole worldview comes with this. One of the most defining features of trauma is that it seems unfair and unwarranted. It rests on a way of seeing the world as fundamentally unsafe, somewhat random, and arbitrary. Bad things can happen to good people. That is what really destabilizes us, because it says two things: that something about the world is very dangerous, and that this dangerous thing is something we cannot control or predict, which means our sense of safety could be uprooted at any moment… regardless of the quality of our intentions and efforts.
Depending on the trauma, and on how well it was resolved, that message gets interpreted to different degrees. But the message itself is the same.
Why the response is so intense
When you want to understand why the anxiety that shows up is as intense as it is, one thing that can help is looking back. When was I punished by the external world for not doing anything bad? When was I punished for doing something that turned out to be bad that I did not even know was bad? That is the kind of thing that destabilizes the system. If it was not resolved back then, it keeps showing up now, because the sense of unpredictability is so powerful. The body says, “why would I calm down?” I was just hurt profoundly by something I didn’t see coming, so I should stay alert to do my best to predict anything that could hurt me again in this kind of way.
This is why it matters so much to resolve trauma at a deep level, and to understand its relationship to anxiety. For the untreated body, the fundamental message is: “I am not safe, and I will not be able to feel completely safe again”. This is the interpretation, even without ever having consciously made sense of why the event happened or what it means going forward. For the body, this is a question of life or death. If it does not learn to manage risk at an emotional level, it cannot tell, with any nuance, whether a small risk is really large or a large risk is really small. In that state it stays confused, because it never processed the earlier experiences tied to risk.
To process a traumatic event, is to learn how to compartmentalize it, and to assess the relationship of the event to risk of something similar happening again. And yet, just thinking about it is usually not enough, because part of the memory includes the discomfort in the body related to the event as well. And so, healing the traumatic memory requires at least feeling and reflecting upon some of the traumatic feelings that are still related to the memory; otherwise, we are leaving part of the trauma unprocessed. Processing needs to be done in a gradual and safe way, and it is important to not rush through this process. It is also recommended to receive help and guidance from a trained professional as you work through this. This way someone can help you develop skills to increase your window of tolerance, your ability to tolerate difficult sensations and emotions, as well as helping you process events at a safe pace. The bottom line is that a part of the self still needs to be treated, otherwise the emotional charge of the past will be held in the body, colouring present and future experience indefinitely.
Maybe this gives some clarity. At first you might think, why am I so anxious all the time, and why can I not get rid of it, it is so irrational. It is easy to criticize yourself for the responses your body gives. But these intense responses are actually signals of a deeper emotional reality, one you can come to terms with and then heal. That is where something positive can be found, even in very negative and challenging present circumstances.
The mind can know it, the body has to learn it
One of the core struggles with anxiety is the lost ability to self-soothe and find a stable baseline again. So a crucial part of the work is being able to teach that: how to regain a stable baseline, how to let the body relearn what it means to be safe, how to comfort and soothe yourself. Without that, the body never releases the anxious charge it built up. Even if the mind believes it is in a safe place, the body has to learn it too. There is a process for that, and it involves being connected with the body.
This is also how we can understand that anxiety is not just a mental problem to be reasoned away. It is deeply felt in the body, and it has to find its solution there as well. Otherwise the mind keeps thinking its thoughts while the bodily response stays stuck, stuck on the past, stuck in the anxious pattern. There is essentially a tug-of-war, in the body, between two messages: “the world is safe,” and “the world is dangerous,” and feeling more secure is just a matter of dimming one voice and strengthening the other. The goal is simple in theory, but making it the body’s reality takes time and patience.
The body can learn security
Just as your body learned to be anxious, your body can learn to be secure. That is the core idea here: there are ways to teach your body to feel safe again, grounded in a deeper understanding of what has caused you to feel anxious. Once you can better make sense of what happened and what is happening, and once you become more aware of what is going on in your body and can soothe yourself from a grounded, secure part of yourself, then the message can truly be believed rather than forced: I am safe, I am okay, even with risk and danger present.
That is the message we want to reinforce. The aim is not an awareness with no anxiety in it, but one that knows how to work with anxiety, so it can settle into a more stable emotional pattern that further reinforces the sense of safety. Because the calmer and clearer your awareness is, the more accurately and effectively you can respond. There is a loop in this: if you can feel secure enough, the security can deepen. It is not that the anxiety disappears. It just becomes much less of your reality, and the pattern becomes far more stable. That is the shift we are working toward.