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The Science of Anxiety
Everybody recognises ‘anxiety’, but few people know
specifically what Anxiety ‘is’, what the physical manifestations of
anxiety are and what anxiety means to the body. What is more, the
question as to whether anxiety is a learned reaction or we are born
with a predisposition to be anxious has not yet been settled
scientifically.
As an anxiety disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder is categorised
alongside Panic Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and General Anxiety Disorder. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric
Association defines Social Anxiety Disorder / Social Phobia as:
‘A persistent fear of one or more social or performance
situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or
to the scrutiny of others’.
As we have mentioned before, a certain amount of anxiety is both
natural and indeed desirable, keeping us from unfamiliar or
possibly dangerous things. The ‘fight or flight’ instinct is one
genetically inherited from our long distant ancestors and widely
talked about in addiction science. The ‘flight’ aspect of our
genetic make-up is the sudden rush of adrenaline, noradrenaline and
cortisol surging into our blood stream in order to help us flee
from danger. Our senses are sharpened, our pupils dilate, heart
rate increases, blood diverts from the digestive system to the
muscles and we prepare ourselves for the perceived inevitable
‘attack’.
Anybody that suffers from anxiety will be familiar with these
symptoms. The edgy, hyper-awareness of the anxious that gets so
clumsily referred to as ‘paranoia’. Over time, and a sign of an
actual disorder, is the cumulative effects of these symptoms. What
was once ‘butterfly tummy’ is now a recurring and debilitating
stomach upset. Hyper-awareness becomes chronic fatigue. Our minds,
so alert for so long, become slow and clumsy through over-use,
sometimes tricking us with memory lapses and visualisations. The
symptoms however do not stop. Anxiety does not fade away if you get
tired, it gets worse. The alertness that tells your intuition
‘nothing is actually going to hurt me’ gets eroded, leaving you
with no defence and as a rolling stone will gather moss, so a
disorder will gather symptoms.
Chronic Anxiety, Social Anxiety Disorder / Social Phobia, OCD
and PTSD begin and end in the brain.This has been studied
extensively by scientists the world over, in particular the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, USA.) Here they have the
(somewhat reprehensible) job of scaring rodents and then taking
them to pieces to see what happened (whether they scare them by
telling them their immediate future is not reported!). By
conditioning the rodents, rats, to fear particular stimulus; for
instance shocking them when a light comes on, the rats learn to
fear the light even when the shocks have been removed. Then, in the
interests of science, localised areas of the rats brains are
destroyed and their reactions are further studied to see which
parts of the brain are the ‘fear’ bases. What they discovered was
that the ‘seat’ of the rats’ anxiety was in the Amygdala, an almost
insignificantly small part of the brain that controls our entire
body in a crisis.
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