Many people suffer their anxiety in silence because they think there is nothing to do about it except for taking antianxiety pills.
But is it true?
This opinion is only reinforced by many mainstream psychologist and MDs who embrace the chemical theory that anxiety and depression are both caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.
This theory is so widespread not because it has more merits than others but because it is easy to understand and because it brings benefit to the pharmaceutical industry.
But there are more causes to your anxiety than you would imagine. Knowing them gives you ways to tackle it without pills.
Based on my experience of both healing my own anxiety and working with people who suffer from it I came to understand that anxiety is a monster with more than one head and multiple roots. Pills are not bad as such. They can help stabilise in a crisis situation but they do not heal anxiety.
1) Our personal history
One root of anxiety grows from our past. It has to do with our personal history, with the experiences we had in our childhood and sometimes also later in life.
Some people who suffer from anxiety carry very heavy stories like child abuse, surviving war, being in refugee camps, neglect, living with alcoholic parents.
This doesn’t mean that we have been all traumatised forever by very horrible events. My own childhood story is rather ordinary and uneventful and my parents were very kind and caring people.
However, children have a certain way of experiencing life which is very different from our experience as adults. So many of our fears, our underlying feeling of insecurity is rooted in our experience as children.
2) Is Anxiety a learned behaviour?
The second root of anxiety is about learned behaviours.
You can be a Darwinist or not! You can agree or disagree with the theory that people have evolved from monkeys, that is your choice! However, when it comes to learning I have to tell you: we are all monkeys.
We learn from others by imitation. This is what children do. We all learned our basic behaviours from our parents at a very young age.
A lot of the anxiety we experience is learned anxiety. In the same way we learn how to walk and how to talk from our parents we also learn our emotional responses to the environment.
That is, for example, if you grow up with a hypochondriac father who worries about each little scratch you get, you will learn that getting scratches is a very dangerous issue and react accordingly.
Take another example, my mother was a very worrying, very lovingly worrying person. She was worrying about everything. And not only that, she had also an ingrained belief that worrying was a prove of love.
So what did I learn? I learnt that if I love somebody it comes at a pack with worrying about them.
3) Unfortunate events in adult life that trigger anxiety
Some people suffer from anxiety as result of an unfortunate event that happened in their adult life. It can be:
-witnessing or being the victim of violence,
-being involved in a car crash,
– going through war,
-rape.
Many of these people might be diagnosed at a certain point with PTSD (Postraumatic Stress Disorder).
4) A culture of anxiety
As we advance in life we start broadening our perspective from the circle of our family to the society we live in.
If the messages we got in our family are discordant from the mainstream culture, we might start doubting the validity of our beliefs and behaviours.
An overly anxious person living in an environment that is based on trust and peacefulness will start questioning the validity of his own emotional responses. That person might even learn new healthier behaviours that heal their anxiety.
Unfortunately, most of us live in what I call “the culture of anxiety”.
Everybody around us is stressed and busy.
The message that we get in our modern society is that being busy is a medal of glory and that we need to work hard to survive.
We are constantly in competition with others for limited resources and even worse, in competition with ourselves. There is very little space left for relaxation. There are almost no messages in our culture about living a happy abundant life.
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