Healthy vs Unhealthy Anxiety
Everyone experiences some type of anxiety, panic, or nervousness at some point in their life.
Anxiety is actually a healthy emotion to have and serves a great purpose. Anxiety’s purpose is the alert you to danger, and help keep you safe.
An example I give my clients is, let’s say you walk down an alley every day for work, and nothing bad has happened and typically you enjoy your walk. Then, one day a dog chases you down the alley while you are walking to work. The next time you walk through that alleyway, you may experience anxiety symptoms of checking over your shoulder, tightness in your chest, feeling shaky, or having a panic sensation.
This is because your brain remembers this event as dangerous and associates it with this area, so your anxiety is trying to warn you to be careful and look for warning signs. What a great system right? That’s why it’s important to really look at your anxiety and understand it, because it may be trying to tell you something!
So healthy anxiety can create positive behavior, as it may lead you to walk down a different way to work in order to protect yourself. If you are changing your behavior or thought’s about an event that happened to create anxiety, this is actually a positive thing, it means that you learned something was dangerous and you are doing something different to avoid the danger.
Healthy anxiety examples would look like these examples:
You have anxiety about a presentation that is due tomorrow, so you spend a little more time studying and practicing your presentation.
You feel anxious about the car behind you driving fast behind you, so you move over to another lane.
When does anxiety become unhealthy then? Unhealthy anxiety means that you can’t tell the difference between safety and danger, which makes it hard to make healthy decisions on managing the anxiety. If anxiety is affecting your ability to work, difficulty sleeping due to racing thoughts, or difficulty completing daily tasks, your anxiety may be in the unhealthy range.
Unhealthy anxiety can develop due to many reasons, but one is going through a traumatic experience.
Trauma can mean many things including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, car accidents, going through war, or being bullied. When someone goes through a traumatic experience, their anxiety can go into overdrive, or that’s how I explain it to my clients. Unhealthy anxiety can be something that is consistently there or only pops up in certain situations. Unhealthy anxiety can feel debilitating and paralyzing and can stop people from living their lives.
Unhealthy anxiety examples would look like these examples:
· You got into a car accident multiple years ago, and now you feel anxious to drive, so you stopped driving.
· You watch the news daily and continue to see some negative events in your town, so you never leave your house anymore.
If you are struggling with some unhealthy anxiety that is stopping you from living your life, therapy is a great way to start working on identifying where your anxiety started. A therapist can also help identify the possible events that led to this and work on identifying the difference between safe and dangerous situations.
Begin Therapy for Anxiety in Arizona and Colorado
Learning to cope with both healthy and unhealthy anxiety takes time. This is I’m happy to offer support with identifying the sources of your anxiety so you can overcome them. You can start your therapy journey with Aspen Grove Counseling, so let’s connect today!
