This is a short video.
Answering the question of why we feel anxiety.
This is a question my clients often ask me.
And I think it's really important to understand if you're somebody who struggles with anxiety in any way.
The place for us to start is the idea that anxiety itself is a normal,
Healthy human emotion.
But of course,
Nobody likes anxiety.
It's painful,
It's uncomfortable,
It's unpleasant.
Nobody who's struggling with anxiety.
Wants to feel it,
It's a really tough emotion to experience.
I think it's really helpful to understand that it's supposed to be uncomfortable.
So to understand that,
We really have to think about the brain and the threat system.
And so if you imagine that you're living on the savannah,
20,
000 years ago.
You're walking along.
And you hear a rustle in the grass.
Immediately your brain is going to notice that.
Fact that it's some kind of threat or could be some kind of threat.
And very quickly decide should you fight,
Should you flee,
Should you freeze,
Should you take another.
Self-protective survival.
Choice.
And if you feel anxiety,
Your brain is signalling flee,
The best thing to do is to run.
And so in that situation,
Anxiety is like a kind of an alarm.
That signals,
Number one,
Something's wrong,
There's a threat.
And number two,
You should do something about it.
In this case,
Run.
And this is what anxiety is for.
So if you think about it,
Anxiety was a neutral or even a pleasant sensation for us.
We could very easily ignore it,
Couldn't we?
We could be walking.
.
.
Along the Savannah.
We could hear the rustle.
We could not do anything.
And then we could be eaten.
And the psychologist Paul Gilbert has a brilliant saying,
He says that we can eat lunch thousands of times.
But we can only be lunch once.
And I think that's such a helpful and powerful tool.
Ideas Because what it means is that the threat system in your brain is designed to overreact,
Overreact.
Many many times,
Because if it underreacts one time,
Your lunch.
So this is why we feel anxiety.
It's a signal to us that something's wrong,
Something's scary or threatening or dangerous.
And we should do something and something we should do is run.
Avoid,
Get away from the threat.
None of this means,
Of course,
That there's nothing we can do about anxiety.
There's lots we can do to help you with your anxiety and I'll be making subsequent videos on that.
But the really helpful place is just with acceptance.
Start with acceptance.
Anxiety is a normal,
Healthy emotion.
It's actually necessary and useful for us,
We wouldn't want to get rid of it.
It's just what can we do to reduce it so we don't have a disproportionate response.
And so we can use things like breathwork is really powerful and helpful.
We can do parts work with therapies like IFS.
We can do all sorts of useful things to help reduce our anxiety.
It's just we never want to actually get rid of it.
We just really want to produce it,
Learn to live with it.
So it's not having such a debilitating impact on our lives.
So I really hope that's helpful.
And I will be making videos,
More videos.
Really speaking about what we can do about anxiety in the future.
Thanks so much for watching and I'll speak to you again soon.
