Why Anxiety Feels Like a Heart Attack: The Neuroscience of Anxiety
The threat center in our brains can be turned on by our own thoughts.
Our thoughts are so powerful. We can create threats in our mind that our body responds to as as if we were facing a lion, a true threat to our very survival.
You’re a happy, carefree zebra. You’re happily munching grass on a perfect sunny day alone on the savannah.
Until … you spot a lion checking you out. He thinks you look good enough to eat.
The lion is a threat. A legitimate threat … because he would literally like to eat you.
When you are a zebra and you see a lion that is a legitimate threat to you, a flip gets switched in the threat center in your brain and your brain then sends signals throughout your body.
In response to those signals, your beautifully striped black and white body automatically responds like this:
- your heart starts beating fast and hard
- your breathing gets shallow
- your hooves may get sweaty and tingly
- your brain gets fuzzy or foggy … you can’t think straight
- your stomach gets upset … it’s likely your body violently expels all of that freshly eaten grass
Why does your brain tell your body to do these things?
Because, it’s protecting you. It’s trying to keep you alive. It’s readying you to Flight. Fight. or Freeze.
You’ll need lots of oxygen = heart pumping, lungs breathing – CHECK.
Concentrate the blood to the center of the body = tingly, sweaty hooves – CHECK
Turn off the part of the brain responsible for things we don’t need right now like concentration, attention, elaborate reasoning = fuzzy, foggy head – CHECK
Get rid of dead weight = stomach upset – CHECK
It’s time to run.
You are fleet of foot. You have awesome defensive maneuvers.
And you – you, beautiful zebra you! – get away!
Once you think you’ve lost him, you check your surroundings. Look over your left shoulder – all clear. Right shoulder – also all clear. Whew! Sigh of relief…
… and … click. The switch is flipped back. Your threat center is now off. Your heartbeat, your breathing, your cognition, and your gut function all go back to normal. And, you happily go back to munching grass.
To summarize:
Lion = threat —> threat center turns on —> physical sensations of anxiety appear —> take action to address the threat —> resolution of the threat —> threat center turns off —> physical sensations of anxiety dissipate —> munch grass
Now, consider what this response looks like for humans in the modern world.
We can be faced with legitimate threats, equivalent to lions. But, for many of us, threats to our very survival are rare.
We have adapted to create threats in our mind. Irrational thoughts label various situations, circumstances, and stimuli as threatening. Our evolutionary survival-focused lizard brain grabs hold of those situations labeled as threats and, in response, activates the sequence in the threat center (as if we were facing a lion).
In our modern society, sooooo many things – which are not legitimate threats to our survival – have become lions for people.
Some common ones:
Public speaking
Spiders
Snakes
Heights
Needles
Such things become labeled in our minds as threats, and we then have a physical reaction when we encounter them … or even when simply thinking about them.
Others:
Work overwhelm
Running late
Driving somewhere new
Going places alone
For those with social anxiety: social interactions, happy hours or networking events, ordering at the counter, opening e-mails, responding to text messages
For my folks with health anxiety: results of your yearly physical even though you have no symptoms, health-related news headlines, vague physical sensations
The list goes on and on …
What may be a lion for you, is likely also a lion for many other people. But, your lion may also not be a thing at all for many others.
The situations and circumstances that you’ve labeled in your mind as threats are unique to your own history of experiences. You may be an extrovert and love networking events, while your best friend dreads them with every fiber of her being. She may then have no health concerns whatsoever, but you jump to the worst possible outcome whenever you notice something out of the ordinary in or on your body.
While the threat center turns on automatically when we encounter one of our specific circumstances, it’s much harder to turn it off.
Once our zebra realized he was free of the lion, the threat center automatically turned off. He could clearly see that the lion was gone and that he was no longer in danger.
But, our threat centers are turned on by our own thoughts, by threats created in our minds, rather than from legitimate physical threats in our environment. So, there is no clear end to the danger. When we can’t turn it off, we feel anxious all the time. And, our minds continue to feed – and add to – such threats as we encounter new perceived lions. At such times our physical symptoms may escalate – into a panic attack – because we can’t turn the threat center off; we can’t convince ourselves that the threats are gone; we don’t believe we are safe.
Through a combination of physical grounding, breathwork, cultivating present moment awareness, challenging and reframing the thoughts labeling the situation as threatening, and strategically exposing ourselves to the things that scare us, we can significantly reduce the experience of anxiety. Such strategies give us the tools and skills to manage such situations when they arise in the moment and to remove the limits anxiety places on our lives.
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This blog post is offered for educational purposes only and should not be confused as therapy or psychological care.