Anxiety - The Fear of Uncertainty
Our brains are designed first and foremost to help us survive. Over time, they’ve developed the ability to scan for and identify problematic situations, allowing us to protect ourselves from harm.
Fear is the brain’s response to danger in the present.
Anxiety is the brain’s response to danger in the future.
By anticipating what problems lie ahead, the brain can manufacture a solution before the issue arises. The solution is implemented, the threat is neutralized before it becomes an issue, and we’re free to continue thriving. Anxiety is a signal generated by the brain that alerts you to potential future threats.
Anxiety is Useful
We can see why this was a useful signal back in our early days. Consider a caveman that has left the safety of his tribe, headed into unexplored territories. Walking along the plains, he’s scanning his environment, both curious about what he will find, but also mindful of dangerous animals.The coast is clear, so he continues. Soon, he reaches the edge of a dense jungle, and pauses. He has relied on his senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc…) to monitor for dangers before they get too close to threaten him. This jungle poses a problem. He can’t see into it due to the dense vegetation and lack of sunlight, and doesn’t know what lingers beyond the treeline. He notices some discomfort in his body. His heart rate increases ever so slightly, he notices his palms getting sweaty, and his breaths have become more shallow.
There’s nothing threatening about this jungle yet - after all, it’s just a bunch of trees. He’s not scared, but still, he feels uneasy…he’s feeling a bit…anxious. What our intrepid caveman is experiencing is the fear of the unknown - the fear not of what is, but what could be. He doesn’t sense any dangers ahead of him, but he’s been alerted to the potential for danger should he venture unprepared into the jungle. He’s not quite sure what he should be afraid of, but his brain is working as intended; sending a signal in his body that’s alerted him to the potential of a future unwanted outcome.
We face modern-day versions of the dense jungle every day, where many things can feel uncertain or unsafe. As an anxiety therapist in NYC, I’ve worked with many clients who have become intimately familiar with the chronic stress and anxiety that life in the “concrete jungle” can bring.
“What if I become sick? What if I lose my job? What if I get rejected? What if I make a mistake?” Do any of these sound familiar? If so, you are not alone. As these possibilities enter our minds, our brains assess them to see whether a possibility warrants sending the anxiety signal to warn us about it. Brains are excellent at filtering out most of these possibilities as:
Irrelevant (“this won’t apply to me”)
Unlikely (“this probably won’t happen to me”)
Manageable (“even if this happens, I’ll be okay”).
The brain likes to be efficient, and does not like sending resources (our time, our energy, our attention) to where they are not needed, so this filtering system is very useful. Unfortunately, the system does not always work as intended.
When Anxiety Becomes Less Useful
The brain learns and adapts to new information as we grow and experience the world. Some of these experiences are painful, aversive, or uncomfortable. The brain, engineered to ensure its own survival, takes note of these painful experiences and learns how to recognize their warning signs so that it can guard against them. The brain learns of new dangers, moving beyond just threats of physical harm, to include other aspects of our being worthy of protection: our social standing or reputation, our emotional safety, our financial security, the well-being of those we are close to. As more and more becomes relevant to our survival, the brain’s filtering system widens, and the anxious signal gets triggered more often.
Every time you respond to anxiety, your brain learns: “this must have been important.”
Over time, it sends the signal faster, louder, and more often, and constantly pulls us into an anxious loop where we are so focused on responding to perceived threats that we leave other aspects of our lives neglected or unfulfilled.
Why Anxiety Persists
The brain can’t know for sure that a future negative outcome won’t happen, and that feels risky. It will continuously urge us to address the risk for the sake of our own protection. As we respond to these threats (after all, our brain is telling us there’s a threat out there, so why wouldn’t we address it?), the brain learns that the frequent warnings it sends are useful, and are keeping us safe.
So it becomes more vigilant, always on the lookout for anything that could go wrong. What was once irrelevant is now pertinent, what was possible is confused with what is likely, and what was survivable is instead catastrophic. As the filtering system weakens, we find ourselves worrying about all sorts of anticipated dangers and worst-case scenarios, to the point where we are chronically on-guard, physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted, protecting against an unending stream of potential threats.
The thing our anxious brains want the most is certainty, a 100% risk-free guarantee that the unwanted outcome is no longer possible. If the outcome is possible, we are still in danger, and that is simply not acceptable. All we need to do to turn off the warning signal and quell the uncomfortable anxious sensations is to neutralize the threat by being certain the unwanted outcome won’t come to pass. Unfortunately, certainty is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to achieve. Speak to anyone who has suffered with chronic anxiety, and they’ll recount experiences where they spent hours upon hours worrying about something (their health, social situations, finances, family members, work or school performance, the list goes on) only to come out of the experience even more distressed and no closer to a solution.
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a sure thing. You can worry about every potential scenario and attempt to work through every single thing that could go wrong (an exhausting, distressing mental experience known as rumination) and spend hours seeking reassurance from the internet, friends and family, or medical providers, but your brain will never be satisfied. Despite your best efforts, a sliver of doubt will always remain, and your brain will always respond with a tormenting, maddening question: “But what if….”
The problem isn’t that you don’t have enough certainty. The problem is that your brain is demanding a level of certainty that doesn’t exist. We check, we ruminate, we seek reassurance, trying to be sure that we’ll be okay, to no avail.
While our responses can bring short-term relief, they are also telling the brain “Good job! Thank you for alerting me to this!,” reinforcing the very signal we’re desperately trying to get rid of.
Even if we’re 99% sure that something will go well, that 1% of uncertainty is enough to trigger a “what if” question. There will always be a component of unknowability to the future, that unknown will always be perceived as a threat, and the brain will always alert us to it.
Learning to Live With Uncertainty
If you’ve recognized yourself in these words, there is hope. Your brain is doing exactly what it learned to do - and it can learn something new. The same brain that learned to worry so vigilantly can also learn to relax its guard. Therapy for anxiety can help you better tolerate the unknown, reduce patterns of rumination and reassurance-seeking, and bring your focus back to what brings you purpose and meaning.
It’s not about getting rid of anxiety entirely - it’s about no longer being ruled by it. You’ve spent long enough preparing for the jungle - it’s now time to step into it.
