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By Ellie Dunne & Toni Brennan
Anxiety is a relevant topic today as everyone comes to a point in their life when Anxiety is an issue. How am I doing at school? At life? Why haven't I accomplished more? Questions that plague our mind daily with intrusive thoughts and concerns. Anxiety is defined as an emotion characterized by feelings of "tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure." It is as normal as the emotion of sadness, anger, happiness, and it is nothing to be ashamed of.
According to St Patrick's Mental Health Services, "One in nine adults suffer from a primary anxiety disorder in their lifetime." Anxiety is a subject that most of us suffer with, but when it comes with genuinely affecting our Mental Health, we have no idea what Anxiety is. Yes, it's an emotion, but what does it actually do? Why do I feel the way I do? Why do I react like that? That's why my Partner (my looovvveee partner) and I wanted to write this short article in explaining the science and biology behind Anxiety. Hopefully, it helps people understand that it is nothing to be ashamed of or ‘popularized’ either. It should just be as simple as the rest of the emotions.
In today's society, when you suffer from Anxiety, you'll usually hear a response of "Oh sure, everyone has anxiety" or "What would you be anxious over?" Many people will say, "I have anxiety," which is valid but to help understand Anxiety even though you feel it, you need to know what it stands for. Anxiety affects all age groups from early childhood, adolescence to adulthood. The disorder has no limitation on whom it affects or when. Anxiety is a term for a broad spectrum broken down into categories of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Panic Disorder (PD) & Agoraphobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Specific Phobias, Social Phobia and Perfectionism. This highlights that Anxiety isn't just a stand-alone topic but an extensive range of categories inside the spectrum that affects more than 40 million people globally. Just because someone's Anxiety is not like yours does not lessen their struggle or mean "they don't have it". The awareness and realization of Anxiety being a spectrum gives people a deeper understanding of how the term "Anxiety" is just the tip of the iceberg. These disorders make up the Anxiety Spectrum Disorder, which various people will fall under different categories.
However, these categories help define the different types of Anxiety in the spectrum, but it still leads us to wonder what's happening to our squishy brain. If you ask most people what they think Anxiety is or where it comes from in the body, they might not know the science behind Anxiety. I myself have been to many doctors and psychologists in the last 10 years about Anxiety and panic attacks, and they've never sat down and thoroughly explained why my body does what it does when I get anxious. If you ask, you'll most likely hear about the flight or fight response, which we will get back to, but this simple explanation isn't enough to help your brain when Anxiety does, in fact, attack. Looking up "what is anxiety" on google, I got results from the HSE and NHS, and other clinical websites. Scanning through them, I got "symptoms, ways to help, and tips." Yet, it's not enough to know why we get a racing heart and feel dizzy.
It all starts in our brains. Obviously. I sucked badly at biology, but even I could understand this. There are two parts of our brain that Anxiety comes from: 1, The Amygdala, and 2. The Prefrontal Cortex. The amygdala is a little bit near the base of the brain that basically is our emotional brain. Our big gigantic overwhelming emotions come from something the size of a walnut. The amygdala is our first responder. It's first to the scene of the crime and immediately makes our body react. It's always alert and looking for things that may cause us harm. That is why we have the fight or flight response. Our amygdala sees a potential threat and immediately springs to action giving our body signals to either run away from the danger or fight it. SO it pumps our body with hormones to get us ready. The thing is, a lot of the time, our amygdala is wrong. There is no hunter after us. It might have been a notification from Instagram.
Then there is the Prefrontal cortex, which, just like the name suggests, is at the front of our brains and is our logical brain. It's most evolved and is responsible for the decisions we make and our rational thinking. This is the guy that's late to the scene of the crime. The amygdala has already gone and doused some of the fire before the PFC has had time to catch up. Our PFC is the part of the brain that, after your amygdala spreads a code red through your body, it realizes and helps us to focus on things like calming down and rationalizing what made us anxious in the first place, but we're too busy listening to our emotional brain to notice.
This article is not to scare you and not our intentions! We want to provide you with enough information that you can safely say, "I know why I feel this way," or even give this article to someone to read to get a better understanding of your struggles. We will discuss in a later article about the hormones released when our brain gets anxious. This article (not sure if I like the word article) was to help you, the reader, understand the biology and science behind what happens in the brain when you are anxious. Let us know your thoughts!
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