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Ch. 1 WTF is Anxiety Anyway?

Put your imagination hat on, because we are going back to prehistoric times. Pretend that you are a cave person with a romantic partner and a couple small children. You’ve got a nice little cave with some awesome stick figure paintings on the wall and your partner has got this whole lighting a fire thing down on luck. Well one day you are out in the plains forging for food or whatever the hell it is you cavemen do all day and you decide to drop back by the cave to rest for a bit. As you roll up to your home, you notice some big ass animal foot prints leading into the cave. After a micro second of analysis you suddenly realize holy shit, a lion is trying to eat my babies. Are you just gonna take that? Hell to the no. Evolution’s got your back.

As soon as you realize what’s going on, your brain prompts a neurochemical cascade that kicks your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive— in other words, you Hulk out. Your heart pumps massive amounts of blood to your muscles so you can dash across the room like the Flash. Your pupils adapt to make your vision sharp as a hawk, and before the lion knows what hit it, you wump it on the head with a massive rock right before it takes a swipe at your cute little family. Score. Now your family is safe and you have dinner settled for the next week.

This is an example of the infamous fight or flight response. Super useful for bashing in the heads of predators or running for your life from a rapidly approaching brush fire. Not so useful when you are in the middle of taking an exam or taking a elevator up to the 23rd floor with your boss.

A bit of anxiety is helpful and adaptive. It’s completely necessary not only for fight and flight situations, but also as the force that will kick you in the ass and remind you that you need to get your report done before the deadline. Anxiety becomes a problem when it’s triggered seemingly out of nowhere, when it causes you extreme discomfort, or when it prevents you from performing successfully in life. Do you have an exam or deadline at work coming up? First date? Anxiety is a totally normal reaction to those things. However, if that anxiety is so crippling that you couldn’t even go on the date because it felt like your heart was going to explode out of your chest or you couldn’t stop crying long enough to take phone calls at work, then it’s probably time to do something about it.

This is the part where I tell you the same boilerplate message that’s on my voicemail at work: If this is a psychiatric emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Seriously, though - if it’s that bad, please please please get some immediate help. Stay safe, friend. If it’s bad enough that’s it’s really distressing you or interfering with your life to a significant degree, then getting non-emergency professional help might really help you out. I’ll talk more about that later in the “Get Your Head Shrunk” chapter. Feel free to skip ahead to that chapter if that is something that you want to pursue ASAP.

Knowledge is power and you have taken the first step toward arming yourself with some real nuggets of wisdom. Actually, the sheer fact that you have decided to get off your ass (or stay on it) and read this book indicates that you are ready to make a change. You are ready to kick this thing in the balls. You won’t feel 100% better this very moment, but I promise you that you are definitely on your way. Just keep swimming.

Okay, enough with the encouragement and introductory stuff. You want to get started with the actual helping part. Me too. Let’s do it. In the next chapter I’m going to talk about the nifty ways your douchebrain influences your actions and how that comes back around to bite you in the ass with anxiety.