For a present-day example, we’ve used slamming on our car’s brakes to avoid an accident as a survival mechanism initiated primarily by our amygdala. This is an example of a reflexive, immediate reaction that occurs at the survival level. Alternatively, if driving your car in normal traffic causes you anxiety, the anxiety is produced by your prefrontal cortex trying to predict what may happen based on your past experience of narrowly avoiding an accident.

So, you may now be wondering “where does fear fit in your example?” As Judson Brewer notes “Fear 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.” Since you can’t predict when or even if an event will occur that requires you to slam on the brakes, the maladaptive result is a general sense of anxiety, conscious or unconscious. In other words, very few of us experience fear when we get in a car, but some of us experience chronic anxiety whenever we get behind the wheel.

Now let’s step back from our driving example and think about chronic anxiety at large. There may be many things that cause us anxiety.

Fear tends to have a beginning and an end (slamming on the brakes) but anxiety may be chronic.

Again, as Brewer notes the prefrontal cortex can “take whatever it’s got in the moment, use worry to whip it together, fire up the adrenaline oven, and bake you a loaf of bread you didn’t ask for: a big hot loaf of anxiety.”  Such a visual description of anxiety! So, what do we do to interrupt this cycle of a busy mind creating anxiety where an actual threat may not exist? Here’s where the Resilient Leadership principle of understanding the anxiety in the emotional system is so important!

Remember that our foundational question in understanding any emotional system is always “what is my role in this?” In this anxious system (couple, family, job, team, department, any relationship) ask yourself “what am I doing that is raising or lowering the anxiety is this system?”