No one enjoys anxiety. It’s an unpleasant emotion to feel. At its heart, anxiety is fear. Sometimes we know what’s stirring up that fear, and sometimes we have no idea why we’re feeling anxious. We just know our heart is beating faster. Our muscles are tense. We’re short of breath. And sometimes we sweat. Despite how unpleasant anxiety is, it is your friend. Here’s why: it’s informing you that you are unsafe. It’s also fueling your response to get to safety.
Anxiety: Your Friend That Informs You That You are Unsafe
I know it sounds weird to call anxiety your friend. Most think of it as a “disorder”, “problem”, and “enemy to medicate”. For some, it is all that and more when their anxiety is due to a physical cause like a genetic condition, brain formation or function problem, or a specific health issue like heart disease. However, even when anxiety is due to these physical conditions, it’s still your friend. Why? Because it’s informing you that you are unsafe.
Besides the physical conditions that cause anxiety, two other causes of anxiety are much more common: experience-based stimuli and mind-based stimuli. Experience-based stimuli are reality-based experiences that threaten your safety and possibly your life. Mind-based stimuli are scary thoughts and beliefs in your mind. To learn more about experience-based and mind-based causes of anxiety, read Two Causes of Anxiety: Experience-Based and Mind-Based Stimuli.
Whatever causes your anxiety, it’s your friend because it’s informing you that your safety is at risk. Knowing when you’re unsafe is essential to your life, health, and happiness.
Anxiety: Your Friend That Fuels Your Response to Get Safe
In addition to informing you that you’re unsafe, your friend anxiety fuels your response to get safe. It drives your fight, flee, freeze, or fawn response. If you think you can overcome the threat, you fight. If you think the threat is going to overcome you, you flee.
When you can’t fight or flee, you freeze or fawn. Freezing is freezing in place, being unable to move, and hoping the threat passes you by. Fawning is trying to negotiate your way out by saying things like, “Please don’t hurt me.” “Here take my money and let me go.” “I promise I won’t tell anyone, just please let me go.”
Having a friend like anxiety that fuels your response to get safe is essential to your life, health, and happiness. It fuels your action to go see your physician and rule out physical causes of your anxiety. It fuels a wide range of actions mentioned above, intended to get you to safety. Anxiety supports your survival. It helps keep you alive. It’s a wonderful and necessary friend to have.
Conclusion
Sure, no one enjoys anxiety. It’s unpleasant to feel. Most of us resist it. When we understand that it informs us that we’re unsafe and fuels our response to get safe, we can embrace it as a friend instead of avoiding it, dismissing it, suppressing it, or trying to numb it away. Embracing anxiety as a friend supports our life, health, and happiness. It’s essential for our survival.
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