4 Biggest Myths About Anxiety Everyone Believes
By: Nick Wignall
Tags: Self, Psychology, Anxiety, Life, Mental Health

2. You need to understand the origin of your anxiety

One of the biggest misconceptions about anxiety is that it’s necessary to understand its origins in your life in order to deal with it effectively.

For example, I had a client once who came to see me because she was having panic attacks anytime she drove on the freeway. She told me that she was convinced that the origins of her panic were in her childhood and her father’s habit of driving while intoxicated. And she hoped that by exploring these childhood memories together we would be able to free her from her panic attacks.

Now, it’s not hard to see how a child might develop some significant driving anxiety as a result of being driven around by an intoxicated parent. So my client’s ideas about how to resolve her anxiety were understandable.

But as I tried to explain over the course of a few sessions, the way out of her driving anxiety was going to have very little to do with her past and everything to do with her present.

Because here’s the thing:

The original cause of anxiety is rarely the maintaining cause.

In my client’s case, it’s very possible that, as a result of her father’s drunk driving, she developed a habit of worrying a lot while driving. But when you think about it, her father wasn’t causing her driving anxiety now as a 45-year-old woman. What was causing her driving anxiety and panic now was the habit of worrying about her own anxiety while driving.

At my client’s request, we spent weeks and weeks exploring every nuance of her past and memories about her father and his drinking and driving. And while there were some interesting tidbits to be gleaned, my client’s driving anxiety and panic persisted.

No matter how much insight she got into the origins of her anxiety, the habit of worrying while driving persisted, and along with it, her panic attacks.

And the reason was straightforward: While her father’s drunk driving may have been the initial cause or trigger for her driving anxiety, it was her habit of worrying and catastrophizing in the present that was maintaining it.

This meant that we could explore her past until both of us were blue in the face, but until we took care of the habits in the present that were maintaining her anxiety, she would continue to have panic attacks while driving.

If you really want to free yourself from anxiety, it’s your present, not your past, that holds the key.

What’s more, the original cause or trigger for anxiety is not only unhelpful, most of the time it’s completely unnecessary for addressing anxiety in the present:

Understanding why your mother didn’t love you as much as you wished she had won’t change the fact that you’re in the habit of worrying about what other people think — and as a result, experience a lot of social anxiety.

Understanding how your learning disability as a teenager led to feelings of inadequacy won’t change the fact that you’re in the habit of putting yourself down with constant negative self-talk — and as a result, experience a lot of performance anxiety.

Understanding that worrying about the future was a normal consequence of your traumatic childhood won’t change the fact that you’re in the habit of catastrophizing and worrying about the future now — and as a result, experiencing a lot of generalized anxiety.

There’s nothing wrong with exploring your past and trying to understand how it’s shaped who you are today.

But if you’re serious about feeling less anxious, you need to understand the habits that are maintaining it in the present and address those head-on.