Anxiety Is in Your Body, Not Your Mind

Why you might want to stop talking about your anxiety and try this instead

Photo: Kittiphan Teerawattanakul/EyeEm/Getty Images

Let’s back up 50,000 years or so. Imagine you’re a Neanderthal taking a leisurely stroll through the fields. Suddenly, in the nearby bushes, you hear a tiger. In a nanosecond, your entire body starts reacting. Your pulse quickens, your breathing gets shallow, your eyes dilate, your body starts producing adrenaline.

Everything happening in your body is good; you’re prepared to survive this tiger encounter. There’s just one small problem. It wasn’t a tiger. It was a tiny prehistoric weasel. Now your body is primed for fight-or-flight, your heart is racing, you’re totally jacked up on adrenaline… but there is no danger.

This is your body on anxiety. Replace the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes with social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, family drama, and you can quickly see why anxiety is the most common mental illness in America, affecting nearly 20% of the population. Modern-day humans are basically a bunch of freaked-out Neanderthals in fight-or-flight mode 24/7.

“Anxiety is an impulse in our body that says, ‘I’m not safe right now,’” says Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, the author of Widen The Window: Training Your Body and Brain to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma. “It’s automatic, really fast and unconscious.”

Your survival brain vs. your thinking brain

In her work, Stanley makes the distinction between the thinking brain, our neocortex, responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, learning, and the survival brain — the limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum — which handles our basic survival, emotions, implicit memory, and stress arousal.

One of the survival brain’s most important functions, according to Stanley, is neuroception, an unconscious process of rapidly scanning the internal and external environment for safety and danger. When danger is spotted, your survival brain sends an instantaneous stress arousal message to your body by turning on the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in the release of specific hormones that lead to certain physical sensations…