When Fear and Anxiety Can Be Your Friends

The river roared as I clung to the raft for my legs for dear life. "Forward! Backward! Inside!," the guides shouted in rapid fire succession, alternating between Spanish and English.

This was not my first time white water rafting. I sailed the rapids of Yellowstone national park at age 12, took a lazy rafting tour down israel's river Jordan. But these rocks and rushing currents were the most intense I had encountered    during my adventures. I strained my ear to listen to the guides, knowing that following their instructions to the T was paramount to my safety.

I spend a lot of time talking about how to combat anxiety and treat it as an unwelcome guest staying in your mind rent free. But what if I told you that sometimes fear and anxiety can be your best friends?

To start with, everybody has a little bit of fear and anxiety sometimes. So you are not alone. Back when we were living in caves, this fear protected us from very real threats such as saber toothed tigers. Though these animals are long extinct, that fear evolved with us.

Whenever we see potential threats to our security,  our eyes and ears ring the alarm and send this signal to the amygdala, the area of the brain in which we process our emotions. The amygdala then interprets these sounds and if it perceives danger, it sends the distress signal to the hypothalamus, the brain's command center that takes over and tells us whether to fight the danger or flee from it (fight or flight.) For a cool diagram of how this works, check out this article from Harvard Medical School. 

The problem is, though, that if you suffer from anxiety like I do, then your amygdala  has the emotional intensity of  of a soap opera. It can be difficult to figure out when it is being sincere ("when the guy in the boat yells at you to paddle forward and backward, listen up so you can avoid drowning in rapids") or whether it's acting like the evil twin that appears in every one of these shows for the sole purpose of wreaking havoc ("you know, your so-called "friend" didn't respond to that text that you sent half an hour ago. They must hate you because you're a terrible person.) 

And while it's good to take the messages from your amygdala with a grain of salt, maybe automatically assuming that the message is coming from the evil twin every time and shooting the messenger on sight isn't the best way to go. Taking the time to step back and evaluate the message will give us the opportunity to detach ourself from the alarm bells going off in our amygdalas and to determine whether or not the message is coming from friend or foe. A

s soon as we are more cognizant of how our anxiety works and the different situations that trigger it, the more we can start to enjoy a peaceful relationship with it.