The Anxious Brain

A 20 minute drive creates anxiety. Suppose I drive over a nail. Tomorrow, when my kids are waiting for me to drive them to school, I’ll have a flat tire.

The headlights on a car coming towards me flash on and off. I think, what a nice person to warn me that the cops have set up a speed trap close by. As the car with the flashing lights passes, the driver looks in my direction. Isn’t it great to live in an area where neighbors are so friendly? That’s what I think on a good day. Other days I’m sure the driver is trying to tell me one of my wheels is falling off.

When I reach the grocery store, I drive around until I find a space where I can drive out forwards. Thus I avoid backing out and crushing someone’s favorite child.

Should I decide to finally wash the car covered with mud, snow, and salt that I can almost hear eating away at the bodywork so I’ll soon be surrounded by mesh on wheels, I have a whole new set of dangers to face. Pieces of metal zoom past my car squirting it with foam and something blue and oily. Water at high pressure floods the windshield. I’m sure that one day the glass will give way and I’ll be blasted until my bones have to function without muscles to drive me out of the car wash.

After I return home and step out of the car, anxiety remains. I have to check that the car keys are in my hand, the hand brake is on, and the garage door closed. Still, I can picture the car careening down the sloping driveway and hitting the house on the opposite side of the street resulting in years of lawsuits.

Then I read that my anxieties are symbolic of something deeper and more traumatic. Is that supposed to encourage me to look for something worse? I’ve just escaped a possible car accident, death by high pressure hose, damaging my neighbor’s property, and potential homicide. There are worse traumas? Well sure, a tsunami on the Connecticut River perhaps.

In family situations, my anxiety most often focuses on choices. What food? Which doctor or dentist? Where to live? What to fix first in the house? For people and relationship questions, I’m willing to go with the flow.

For driving anxiety I plan to take courses to improve my driving skills. That’s been on the back burner a few years. I don’t drive on New Year’s Eve or for fun.

In my work as an RN I study and read to decrease anxiety. As long as it doesn’t paralyze me, being concerned about what could happen may not be such a bad thing. When performing a task that requires sterile technique, I can actually see microscopic bacteria marching up the catheter or tube. I visualize the results of a major infection in Technicolor.

After I’d been an RN for less than two years, I was learning home-care nursing. The 90 year old matriarch of a vast family needed a urinary catheter placed in her bladder. The whole extended family, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews crowded into the matriarch’s bedroom to observe me placing the catheter. The relatives verbalized their anxieties. Clearly they were not going to let anything hurt their matriarch. I listened to the matriarch and her many descendents for fifteen minutes. Fight or flight? Flight was obviously my best option. The person with the highest anxiety in the room was me. The matriarch seemed to enjoy the attention. This situation was way outside my professional and social experience. Since birth I hadn’t seen my mother’s private area but here the whole extended family could see my patient’s private parts. My heart beat three hundred times a minute. Soon I might need medical attention. My solution for work anxiety like this is to learn and practice routine nursing tasks a thousand times.

I have no anxiety-energy left for keeping up with and surpassing my neighbors although I have friends who spend a lot of time worrying about their positions in the social hierarchy defined by wealth and kids’ accomplishments.

In real disasters my anxiety evaporates without a trace. Finally I face a situation that is expected to produce fear and my hyper-alert brain starts to give directions to my body to deal with the circumstances.

Fear and anxiety states are thought to be biologically related. In both circumstances, nerve cells fire with the speed and intensity of automatic weapons in a climactic shoot-out scene from an action-adventure movie. Too much stimulation can produce anxiety. Individuals who can’t reconcile an event such as the death of a loved one with what they know can become anxious. If individuals don’t know how to respond to an event such as a plane crash or a life-altering illness, they can become anxious because they are losing control. If individuals in a crisis situation can act to improve the situation, they may still be afraid but they are less likely to experience anxiety. We can’t control the economy, the housing market, or the weather.

Persons suffering from anxiety disorder often present to doctors or emergency rooms with what seem life-threatening symptoms such as rapidly beating heart, difficulty breathing, and chest pain accompanied by nausea or profuse sweating and fainting. Although the medical community is now more aware of anxiety disorders, medical conditions such as a heart attack have to be ruled out first. Sometimes individuals with anxiety disorders spend a lot of time going from ER to ER before they receive the correct diagnosis and treatment.

Once diagnosed anxiety disorders can be treated successfully. Behavior therapy helps a person cope with anxiety-producing situations. Cognitive therapy helps a person separate realistic and unrealistic thinking. Behavior and cognitive therapies are often combined. With these therapies individuals can feel they are taking control of their lives.

Relaxation therapies work for some people. For me, emptying my mind only produces an open space for anxiety-producing scenarios to flood in.

Medications have proved effective. Since medications have side effects, individuals being treated in this manner need to be informed about what they are taking and to trust their medical practitioners.

Persons with PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) caused by war experiences will benefit from consulting practitioners who have specific knowledge of this.

Rape is the most common cause of PTSD. Clearly rape victims need to be treated as soon as possible.

It may be true that modern society is responsible for a lot of anxiety. But the caveman who didn’t understand the sun’s disappearance or why he felt ill probably felt anxious. After he’d run away from a few wild animals, maybe he sought to avoid animals completely even though he needed their meat for food. I can imagine the caveman who overcame his fears getting the girl. Individuals suffering from anxiety disorders may avoid situations that provoke their anxiety. The avoidance creates problems in their daily lives.

We can’t quickly change the direction of society but an individual can change. A person whose heart pounds when he or she hears the dentist’s drill may avoid visits to the dentist resulting in tooth loss. Learning to control this particular anxiety is clearly beneficial.

Anxiety can be treated if we acknowledge our anxiety, learn how to deal quickly with anxiety symptoms such as rapid heartbeat and difficulty breathing, develop thought processes that help us maintain control and increase our self-esteem, set small, attainable goals, and start now.