At any time in our life, an unexpected event can occur that we interpret as dangerous, threatening or harmful and cause an anxiety attack: tachycardia, palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath, feeling dizzy and unsteady, tremors, sweating, "knot" in the stomach, nausea, dry mouth, etc..
In most cases this psychosomatic reaction is justified, it is the natural and adaptive response of our body to danger.
Anxiety can arise spontaneously in different situations of daily life that seem insignificant and do not have an appreciable emotional charge and, nevertheless, provoke an intense emotional reaction on the person. Given that the origin of this anxiety cannot be associated with the external stimulus, since it does not present danger, threat or immediate damage to physical integrity, we must look for the origin within the person, that is, accepting that it is one's own psychological ego (the self or itself) the one that has been threatened or violated. It can be said that although the spark that starts the "emotional fire" is in the external stimulus, the main focus of it is internal.
An example Typical of this phenomenon is observed when our intervention in an event has not been very successful, or when we interact with a person, either during a conversation or in a spontaneous and accidental relationship, and this emits a negative comment, a reproach, a call for attention about the behavior carried out, a criticism negative, etc. towards us and, in those moments, we perceive an anxiety attack caused by the activation of some negative emotion.
In these cases, although various emotions can be activated, the most significant are the so-called self-conscious emotions or self-evaluations: shame, guilt and pride, which are usually associated with others such as fear, anger or disgust. Although pride is normally a positive emotion (satisfaction in having achieved something important), sometimes It can appear as negative (arrogance, arrogance, deification, haughtiness, conceit, egotism, narcissism, etc.).
These emotions arise when a positive or negative assessment of the person in relation to a series of criteria about what constitutes adequate action in various fields, and they have in common that the intensity they present is not congruent with the negative characteristics that could be attributed to the event same.
Here are the 10 reasons why anxiety exists, why it is triggered in situations unexpected and for which sometimes it becomes dysfunctional and is a problem for the person who presents it. The causes of anxiety are as follows:
1. The negative assessment of the person himself
It is the cause of the anxiety reaction underlying these assumptions that links them to self-perception and assessment of the psychological ego of the person who has been threatened or harmed by the event that occurred: loss of self-esteem, feeling of guilt, sense of responsibility, attack on beliefs and vital values such as freedom, trust, justice, respect, etc.
2. Irrational beliefs
It therefore has to do with the vulnerability of the person to a certain stimulus of the environment that negatively affects some deeply ingrained beliefs: “I have to do everything right”, “the opinion of the others are important to me ”,“ what is happening to me is unfair ”,“ I must assume my responsibilities ”,“ they cannot treat me like that ”, etc.
3. An event triggers a negative thought
The origin of this specific vulnerability that “wakes up” suddenly and unjustifiably to the event that occurred may be related to the association of the current event with a past one, that is, the cause of the anxiety attack would not be the current event itself, but its relationship with some negative experience from the past with which it is related. Therefore, there must exist in the produced event “something” (a kind of signal or marker) related to the Self and stored in the autobiographical memory that has triggered the emotional disturbance suffered.
4. Judgments about ourselves
The experiences are stored and contain labels that identify them and serve to remember them (they activate the neural network that represents), so this current event may have presented one of these labels causing the activation of the system emotional. In this sense, it must be taken into account that self-evaluating emotions have as a precedent some type of judgment of the person about their own actions, that is, we make a negative assessment on some personal or own aspect, some action we have taken. And this self-assessment does not have to be conscious or explicit, we do not necessarily have to realize that it is happening.
5. Early experiences
The genesis of this association would be in a first event (usually during childhood, although it can also occur at any time in our lives) in the that, despite not being of great importance, there were personal circumstances concretelack of attachment and affection, feelings of abandonment or rejection, low self-esteem, depressed mood, etc.) that caused a strong impact on the psychological ego (for example, feeling humiliated, ashamed, defamed) and provoked a very intense emotional reaction that would be accompanied by thoughts such as: "what I have done is wrong", "it was my fault", "I made the most horrible ridicule" "they have hurt my pride", "I am not at your level ”, etc. and it would be etched in the emotional memory.
6. Conditioning the emotional response
This overexcitation of the emotional system generated in the person a hypersensitivity of the emotional system to this event that makes him very vulnerable to it, causing a predisposition to emotional reactions of guilt, shame, fear, mistrust, etc. before events where this Self was affected, so that, when a second event occurs later that contains some element or factor (a label or marker) that is also represented in the original event by the emotional system identifies like out this and elicits the same response that it generated in its day, without this activation coming from the current interpretation of it made by the cognitive system.
In this case, one could speak of a learning process in which the person "learns" this emotional response by associating both events through the common label or marker, and will thus react automatically in other similar situations. It would be a kind of conditioned learning (the Pavlovian conditioning it is a basic form of learning that is based on the association of emotional responses to new situations).
One of the most important characteristics of this type of learning is that it involves automatic or reflex responses, not voluntary behaviors (anxiety associated with a natural stimulus that generated fear, for example an accident, is transferred to another stimulus by conditioning. In addition, there is evidence in favor of direct conditioning experiences, especially for agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which are frequently caused by past traumatic experiences). Based on the above, it can be said that the shame, guilt or hurt pride experienced now, would be conditioned by a pre-existing event.
7. Experiences
It is shown that life experiences that generate mental phenomena (perceptions, thoughts, emotions, feelings, intentions, etc.) they leave a mark In our system of neural networks, that is, there is a physiological correlate of the experience and, in addition, that similar experiences are interconnected, so that these traces can be reactivated when the current experience resembles the original, although the similarity is not complete (which is why part of the current concern is the memory of moments previous).
8. Cognitive distortions
On the other hand, the vulnerability of the person and the intensity of the emotional response to these stimuli can be aggravated if they intervene cognitive distortions (personalization, catastrophism, selective perception, etc.) or she is in an altered state of mind (anxious-depressive), because some negative thoughts have more or less force depending on the emotional state and the perspective we have at the moment in which appear.
9. The survival function
A feature that accompanies this phenomenon is that, despite being convinced of the minor importance of the event, we cannot voluntarily stop the intense emotional activation produced. We continue to feel bad, the unpleasant physical symptoms do not go away, and the memory of the event becomes a disturbing thought that intrudes on the reality of the present moment interfering in our attention on what we do, see or hear (affects the content of the operative or working memory and does not allows us to concentrate on what we are doing: studying, working, talking, observing a landscape, a movie, etc.) because it occurs in our state of consciousness an overlap between the representation of external reality that we perceive at each moment with our senses and that of thought disturbing about the event (internal reality that struggles to dominate the external) thus causing the mental state of confusion and mental cloudiness that so much bother us.
Keep in mind that the emotional system is designed to process information, evaluate it and formulate a response quickly given the threatening situation, giving preference to coping with the situation over other less urgent tasks, that is why it interferes in the thoughts and normal actions such as a recurring and dominant thought to prevent us from being distracted and focusing on what we threat.
10. The emotional memory of the amygdala
From the physiological level, the difficulty to consciously and voluntarily deactivate the activation Emotional and anxiety has to do with one of the brain structures involved in the phenomenon: the tonsil complex. The neurophysiologist Joseph Ledoux points out that the amygdala does not require a conscious stimulus to activate and highlights the importance of the direct communication pathway of the thalamus with the amygdala in the reactions emotional This pathway allows emotional responses to start in the amygdala before we are aware of the stimulus that makes us react or that we identify the sensations experienced, which can be interpreted as evidence that there is a precognitive emotional processing.
The emotional memory Primal is stored in the amygdala and has enormous adaptive value. The function of this tonsil complex in relation to this phenomenon is:
- The evaluation process takes place in the amygdala on the emotional importance of a specific stimulus based on previous experiences with it, he coined the experience as very harmful and strengthens the neural connections that form the psychic imprint that It represents.
- The amygdala is related to learning and maintaining the emotional meaning of sensory cues. You can recall the stimuli associated with a disturbing experience, so that on future exposures to the stimuli, the response is activated more efficiently.
- The amygdala also affects the structuring of memories by associating memories with emotional states, facilitating a greater connection and fixation of the elements to remember, thus allowing their consolidation.
Here you can see more information about the amygdala and the emotional nervous system.
To face this disturbing situation and calm anxiety, the following keys are necessary:
1. Relaxation techniques
Action should be aimed first at reducing anxiety through one of the following: relaxation techniques. We must understand and accept that the first emotional impact cannot be avoided since it originates in the sympathetic branch of the nervous system. autonomously and we cannot act on it by our will (most of the emotional activity of the brain is produced in an unintended way). volitional).
2. Attention training
Under normal conditions, if we avoid thinking about the event, the emotional disturbance will diminish over time. (Unless we constantly think about it and it becomes a recurring thought that will keep the system activated emotional). For this, it is advisable to focus our attention on other things, thus avoiding disturbing thinking (following the method of psychologist W. Mischel from "strategic allocation of care”As a self-control technique). The less time the thought remains in the memory, the less it will interfere in our daily life and little by little the unpleasant psychosomatic effects will be diluted. Mindfulness can be trained with meditation techniques such as mindfulness.
3. Self-control techniques
One thing to keep in mind is that in people with an easily excitable temperament, the emotion triggered by the event is often accompanied by anger, hostility, or indignation and elicits a response automatic "counterattack"Towards the person who" apparently "has attacked her Psychological Self, giving rise to conflictive situations that worsen the situation. In these cases the person should learn to repress the impulse of violent reaction towards the other through self-control techniques.
4. Introspection
Thinking away may be a quick and effective solution for the moment, but the Acquired hypersensitivity of the emotional system to these disturbing stimuli will persist to future situations. So it would be interesting identify what emotion we feel and discover what is the factor of the psychological ego that has been violated in the event (self-esteem, feelings of guilt or responsibility, personal beliefs, etc.). Later, we will have to find out what event in our life had a very great emotional impact at that time and established the neural connections that are activated now in similar events.
5. Psychotherapy: self-awareness and self-esteem
The moment we know the reason for the activation of the emotional system and we identify the emotion we feel, we begin to face the problem. We keep distance between the Self and the disturbing memory (it is interesting here to be able to distinguish, as William James suggests, between the "I" as an observer and the "Me" as the object of experience, that is, between the Self that is suffering the anxiety attack and the conscious Self that observes this anxious state and does not allow itself to be dominated by it). Finally, it would be convenient to introduce some cognitive therapy technique to reduce this hypersensitivity and vulnerability to this type of situation.
