Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

Notice how fear itself does not equal anxiety. Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive. Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.

When we can’t control our anxiety, that emotional fever spikes into panic (defined online as “sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior”).

Amy had gone down the rabbit hole of why. She was desperately trying to figure out why she was anxious, thinking that when she got the answer, she could fix it and her anxiety would go away. Ironically, in the process, she was getting more and more caught up in a why habit loop: Trigger: Anxiety Behavior: Try to figure out why she’s anxious (and fail) Result: Get more anxious