Going deeper into Causes of Anxiety

written by Brittany June 8, 2018

Are you enjoying the Causes of Anxiety series?
If you missed the intro and the first three articles, go check those out before
starting in on this one:

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been discussing Anxiety and the things that could be causing it. We’ve talked about your home environment, your relationships, and last week we got into your health & lifestyle.

This week is Part Four and the final article in the series.
I’ve been excited about writing it! I want to introduce some interesting concepts that delve a little deeper into possible causes of Anxiety.

We’ll cover three subjects:

Avoiding Discomfort
Leftover Evolutionary Responses
Existential Anxiety

Let’s go ahead and dive in.

Photo taken by Mag Pole

Avoiding Discomfort

This first one is huge for me personally.
I’ve lived most of my life avoiding anything that might be uncomfortable. Being a highly sensitive person, discomfort has always come easily to me. I despise to my very core the feeling of being embarrassed, which I guess is an uncomfortable feeling for anyone. So I developed a habit of timidness, and routinely steered clear of any situation that involved putting myself out there for fear of embarrassing myself.

This timidness manifested in bigger more obvious ways, such as avoiding public speaking, but it also caused me to shy away from smaller opportunities like building a deeper connection with people or expressing my true thoughts and opinions. As you can probably imagine, avoiding connecting on a deeper level with people is a great way to become a super lonely person. This is something I’m now actively trying to remedy
in my life.

There are many ways you could be avoiding discomfort.
It took me several years to actually incorporate a workout routine into my schedule because working out is… well, uncomfortable. I could sit here for hours and list out my own examples for you, but for your sake I won’t do that. Suffice to say, I like to feel comfortable. And I’d imagine you do too.

Avoiding the uncomfortable things in life usually seems like the easiest thing to do in the moment. Someone invites you to a networking event but you say no because the thought of standing around attempting small talk with a bunch of randos makes your skin crawl. It’s much easier to stay home, order a pizza and binge watch Westworld (which is obviously the greatest show of all time).

But what if at that networking event, one of those randos was going to be exactly the person you needed to meet to make a reality out of your dream of building movie theaters where you can get a mani/pedi, massage, dinner AND wine all while watching the newest movies?? And if only you had pushed yourself a little bit past your comfort zone, you could be known as the genius behind Movie Spas.

There’s a term for chronically avoiding the uncomfortable:

There’s a psychologist named Albert Ellis who poses an interesting concept which he calls Low Discomfort-Tolerance (LDT for short). LDT occurs because of a strong internal desire to not experience physical or emotional discomfort of any kind.

It’s based on beliefs such as:

I should be able to feel happy all the time
I must be able to feel comfortable at all times
Discomfort and pain are awful and intolerable,
and I must avoid them at all costs

LDT can manifest itself in many ways.
Rumination and Avoidance Coping are the ways it usually manifests for me. I’ve often found myself thinking about how a situation could cause me discomfort, then snowballing into worrying about it for days.

When a situation comes up, our brain automatically runs through all our associations with that situation and all of our past experiences that resemble it, and if any of those associations or experiences were a cause of discomfort for us we will naturally be compelled to avoid it.

Avoidance Coping (psychologically defined as protecting oneself from psychological damage by avoiding dealing with a stressor) causes Anxiety to escalate because typically when you avoid something you think will be uncomfortable, you end up experiencing more of the thing you were trying to escape.

An article on Psychology Today (written by Alice Boyes Ph.D) has some good examples of this:

Here are some examples related to anxiety disorders, but the principle applies to anxiety generally.
– People with panic disorder engage in avoidance coping (including not leaving their home in some cases) in order to try to avoid panicky feelings. The more they try to avoid situations that might trigger panicky feelings, the more almost every situation begins to trigger panicky feelings.

–People with eating disorders put tremendous effort into avoiding feeling fat, but the more they do so, the more their lives are consumed by weight and shape concern.

A non-clinical example is when people who fear abandonment act needy
(e.g., ask their partner “Do you promise you won’t leave me?”) and their reassurance seeking (aimed at reducing their fears) creates a self-fulfilling prophecy because their partner gets sick of the reassurance seeking.

Even rumination can be considered a type of avoidance coping.
When people engage in rumination (over thinking) they are typically trying to think their way out of uncomfortable emotions. A common example is ruminating to try to escape feelings of uncertainty.

Here are some tips for getting better at being okay with discomfort:

Think of discomfort as a friend.
Discomfort may feel scary, but if you think about it…every time you’ve grown and expanded yourself as a person it started with a feeling of discomfort. Remember that time you mustered the courage to talk to that pretty girl, and ended up happily married? Or what about the time you stepped out of your comfort zone and went in for that interview for the job you ended up thriving in? Your comfort zone is not a place of growth. It’s a place of stagnation, and you deserve better than that.
Your comfort zone is not a place of growth. It's a place of stagnation, and you deserve better than that.
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Practice awareness.
Next time an uncomfortable situation arises, observe your feelings, thoughts and reactions. Maybe even record them so you can track the process. Be sure you observe from a nonjudgemental place. Don’t beat yourself up for the way you feel or react. The fact that you’re consciously trying to be better about it should be something you feel proud of.
Confront your discomfort head on.
Even if it starts out in small ways, find a way every day or at least a couple times a week to force yourself into situations that make you uncomfortable. Uncomfortable emotions are a good place to start. Be willing to feel that twinge of inadequacy and fear when a pretty girl says hi to your boyfriend. Rather than trying to run from the feeling, gently let yourself sit with it and accept yourself even in that place where you feel small and afraid. Know that it’s just a feeling and that it will pass just as quickly as it came, especially if you allow it safe passage through your mind.

Then you can venture into bigger ways of confronting your discomfort:
Maybe tell a stranger you love their outfit as you pass them at the grocery store. Invite someone you haven’t gotten to know very well out to coffee. Go for a run at a park in front of the other humans instead of running on the treadmill in your basement.

Leftover Evolutionary Responses

How did Anxiety evolve in humans?

Before we get into this, there are two terms you should understand:

Immediate Return Environment (let’s call it IRE for short)
In an IRE, nearly every decision you make provides an immediate benefit to your life. For example, if you were an antelope your life would be pretty simple. If you’re hungry, you walk over to a tree and eat. If you spot a lion, you run. As an antelope you live a straight forward, to-the-point type of existence. That straight forward existence is called an Immediate Return Environment.
Delayed Return Environment (DRE for short)
In a DRE, most of the decisions you make don’t affect you right away. As modern humans, this is the environment we live in. If we go to work now, we’ll receive a paycheck later. If we want to eat dinner, we have to chop up the meat and veggies and cook it all before eating it.

While an antelope is dealing with immediate worries, such as spotting a lion and making the immediate decision to run, most of the worries we have as modern humans have to do with the future. We’re bent towards chronic stress and anxiety, perpetually thinking ahead and wondering how what we’re doing right now could play out in the future. On top of this, we’re often responding to our environment as if it’s an IRE instead of a DRE, because…

Our brains are not designed for a Delayed Return Environment

Our evolution simply hasn’t caught up with modern society’s ever-quickening change of pace. The human brain actually developed into it’s current form while we were still living in an Immediate Return Environment. It’s only during the last 500 years or so that our society has shifted into a primarily Delayed Return Environment.

The earliest known humans to have a brain similar to ours were alive 200,000 years ago, and the environment they lived in was way more similar to the environment of an antelope than a modern human. So for roughly 200,000 years we as a species have been responding to an Immediate Return Environment, and now suddenly in the last 500 years everything around us has transformed into something we don’t have the proper equipment for. This all happened in such a short window of time from the perspective of evolution. Think about it. 500 years compared to 200,000 years. It makes a lot of sense that our brains have some catching up to do.

The Fight or Flight response was incredibly useful when we lived in an Immediate Return Environment

We saw a lion, our bodies immediately told us to run and we ran. But in modern society, this natural response can cause a lot of unnecessary anxiety for us. Of course there are still rare times where it’s useful, but usually this response is an overreaction.

I observed a great example of this overreactive response years ago when my dad passed a state trooper on the highway. You should know, my dad was without a doubt the most upstanding citizen you could imagine. Instead of drinking at parties in college, he went around with a bowl collecting everyones keys so they wouldn’t drive drunk. He was a straight shooter in every way. So I was surprised to notice him tensing up with anxiety when he passed the state trooper.

He wasn’t speeding, he obviously had nothing illegal to hide, yet his natural response was to tense up. I could see him filled with a momentary shot of adrenaline, and then after a moment it subsided and his shoulders relaxed. I never forgot that small moment, because it amazed me that even someone like my dad had the built-in response to a modern day “predator” that our ancestors would have had to a lion.

Nowadays in our modern society we don’t have to worry about a lion trying to eat us. Yeah, it sucks that we overreact to minor situations like they’re trying to kill us, but I’d say that’s a hell of a lot better than an actual lion. Plus, I’m sure as a species we’ll eventually adapt to our awesome new lifestyle of not being in mortal danger. This is a pretty sweet way of life…we have time to relax and think about stuff. And a lot of amazing ideas and inventions have already come out of that newfound freedom.

But along with this freedom has come an even bigger Lion…

Photo taken by Jezael Melgoza on unsplash

Existential Anxiety

I’ve been looking forward to writing about this one because on a personal level this has been a deeply intriguing and relatable subject for me. When I was grieving the death of my father in 2016 & 17 I experienced something I semi-fondly refer to as a Dark night of the Soul. I mention this experience on my about page, where I quote Eckhart Tolle’s description of the Dark night of the Soul experience:

It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything.

My experience with this is what sparked my interest in the idea of Existential Anxiety. The Dark night of the Soul is a very similar idea to that of Existential Anxiety.

A philosopher named Sren Kierkegaard in the 1800’s came up with a theory called Existentialism.

Existentialism, also referred to as Existential Anxiety or Existential Angst, can be defined simply as a sense of worry, dread or panic that can emerge when someone contemplates life’s biggest questions. You know, questions like: “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, and “What’s the meaning of any of this?”

Philosophical and Psychological perspectives on this maintain that this type of contemplation is inherently distressing, but that the anxiety that naturally arises from asking yourself these big questions is ultimately healthy and productive. And I would have to agree, at least speaking from my own experience. This blog came about because of my own obsessive desire to find a sense of meaning in my life.

Seeing my dad’s life end earlier than anyone expected caused those big life-questions to suddenly flood into my consciousness. I felt thoroughly lost, like hope and meaning were impossible to ever truly grasp. The fear that resulted from those feelings was intense. But because of that anxiety, I finally came to a life-changing decision: If I couldn’t find meaning for myself, I would just create it.

And why not?Who says our purpose has to be some ethereal thing floating out there waiting for us to discover it? What if the secret all along is that it’s up to us to create meaning for ourselves?

Who says our purpose has to be some ethereal thing floating out there waiting for us to discover it? What if the secret all along is that it’s up to us to create meaning for ourselves?

What about you?

If you ever find yourself in a similar place where you’re questioning the meaning of your life, know that this is truly a special and important thing to experience. It’s an opportunity, and a call to adventure. I know it can feel alarming and you may even be caught up in a depression because of it. You may be in the thick of the storm, waves crashing all around with no land in sight, but let these words serve as a lighthouse, shining a beacon of hope from the shore.

This existential angst you’re caught up in, the feeling of hopelessness and lack of meaning… this is literally the opportunity of your lifetime, an experience shared by countless philosophers and other incredible humans in our history. Accept the challenge. Take the dive and let the questions come along with all their uncomfortable feelings.

This dark place is the prerequisite to your growth. The inner liquifying destruction of the cocoon before you get your wings. My friend, you are the seed resting beneath the soil in total darkness. Soon you’ll burst from the earth as a whole new Being, and slowly but surely bloom into all that you desire to be.

If I could emerge out of that soil, you can too.

Until Next Time,
Keep Calm and Grow On

Some stuff to check out if you want to dive deeper into any of this

On the subject of Avoiding Discomfort:

Dr. Albert Ellis and his LDT concept are talked about on page 2 of this Brief Introduction to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy written by Wayne Froggatt. REBT is a fascinating thing to read about, so if that peaks your interest I encourage you to
read the whole thing if you have some time.

On the subject of Evolution:

Check out this video from the Big Thinkers on Mental Health series put out by Big Think and the Mental Health Channel. In the video Dr. Anne Marie Albano, Director of Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders talks about the biological and evolutionary origins of anxiety, the unique features of
anxiety in the 21st century, and more.

On the subject of Existential Anxiety:

Take a look at these videos from Jason Silva. I’m a BIG fan of his work. It’s difficult to describe what it is he does exactly. I usually refer to him as a thinker and expert communicator. He has a YouTube channel called Shots of Awe where he publishes short-form, easily digestible videos that contain bursts of his awe-inspiring rants about life and many other things. His flow-state rants are quite an experience.
I think you’ll really enjoy him.

Deconstructing Anxiety

Beyond Anxiety and Depression… A call to Awakening

How we Free ourselves of Existential Panic

I hope you got a lot out of the Causes of Anxiety series!
If you haven’t already, you should check out the intro to the series
and the first three articles:

I enjoyed jumping down this rabbit hole with you guys. In the future I may put out a follow-up series if it looks like any of you are interested in that. Maybe we can talk more about solutions to some of the causes we discussed here?

Join the Conversation!

If anything you read in the Causes of Anxiety series has helped you hone in on why you may be experiencing Anxiety on a regular basis, I’d love to hear about it.
I’d also love to know what you’d like to see from Keep Calm in the future. What’s something you want me to write about? Let me know in the comments!

2 comments

Brenda October 3, 2018 - 5:04 pm

Thank you

Brittany October 4, 2018 - 7:23 am

🙂 of course