The Dirty Trick Your Anxious Brain Plays on You

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It’s no news that anxiety can undermine your ability to think rationally. Though if you’ve ever experienced a wave of anxiety (and chances are you have), your estimation of an anticipated outcome's urgency and direness probably felt entirely rational.

What’s going on when we’re in an anxious state of mind? Well, a lot. For starters, your amygdala (the so-called “fear” center of your brain) signals the hypothalamus (a brain structure that regulates biological functions like hormone release, body temperature, appetite, and emotional response) to initiate the “fight-flight” response. The fight-flight response increases your heart and breathing rate while diverting blood flow from your extremities (skin, fingers, toes) towards your heart and larger muscles (think: quads and biceps). This helps us rapidly respond to danger. You start to sweat more—a natural cooling mechanism that keeps you from overheating so you can persevere in combatting danger. And your pupils dilate to let in more light and better see your surroundings.

Your digestive system also switches things up: Salivation stops (hence that dry mouth you get when scared or nervous), and you stop breaking down and absorbing what's in your belly (also why you may feel nauseous or develop diarrhea when stressed).

Cognition is equally impacted: You become more alert to dangers (which can make you seem more distracted to onlookers who don’t know what you're going through), hyperaware of negative stimuli, and more likely to perceive ambiguous or neutral facial expressions, situations, and sights or sounds as negative.

How the Anxious Brain Tricks You

Accompanying this warped perception comes another cognitive trap: The anxious brain conflating probability with possibility.

What does this mean? Consider the following scenario, common to many who experience anxiety: You’re lying in bed at night trying to sleep, but you can’t stop thinking about all the ways in which tomorrow’s meeting will go wrong. You’ll wake up late. You won’t sleep enough, and your brain will be foggy. You’ll say the wrong thing. Your fly will be open. People will notice you’ve put on a few pounds. You won’t seem like you know what you’re talking about. Everyone will know you’re a fraud. There's no way you'll be able to prevent these outcomes, which are highly likely to happen. As a result, you're bound to be completely humiliated.

Sound familiar?

Maybe the situation is a bit more dire. You’re worried someone who’s threatened you in the past will show up at your house. And you're convinced you won't be able to defend yourself, and no one will help you. Or you’re convinced you’re about to get laid off, leaving you unable to afford rent and health insurance and destitute with no one to support you and no future job prospects.

All of these scenarios are possible. But are they highly likely to occur exactly how you imagine them, when you anticipate them, and with all the expected outcomes and consequences? In most cases, the answer is no. But the anxious brain conflates possibility with probability, confusing feared outcomes with likely ones. It assumes all the bad things it can envision happening very well may (or definitely will) happen. Rarely is this an accurate assessment of reality—and rarely is this an accurate forecast.

Because the anxious brain's predictions are often so off base, it's critical to catch this confusion when it begins. In doing so, you can help reduce the intensity of the anxiety you're experiencing and better regulate your emotions and behavior.

How to Stop the Anxious Brain's Faulty Forecasts

1. Recognize. Start by identifying when you're in a state of anxiety. Look for the physical signs: shallow breathing, clammy or sweaty hands, racing thoughts and difficulty concentrating, elevated heart rate or blood pressure, muscle tension, and feeling a heightened sense of threat.
2. Assess. Next, interrogate the worst-case scenarios running through your brain. Acknowledge that they are possible. But ask, how likely, on a scale of one to five–with one extremely unlikely and five extremely likely–is this feared outcome to happen?
3. Prepare. For many people, it also helps to envision the worst-case scenario and, despite its low likelihood, brainstorm how to best prepare for it. If you genuinely fear that someone will show up at your house, for example, it may be worth seeking an order of protection, installing an alarm system, taking a self-defense class, and having a means of self-protection and a safety plan (who to call, where to go, what to do) in place. If you're genuinely worried you aren't prepared enough for a presentation, don the outfit you plan to wear and enlist a friend or colleague to watch you run through rehearsals. Preparatory steps like these can help you feel more confident in being able to handle feared outcomes—which helps reduce anxiety even further.
4. Visualize success. The anxious brain often blinds us from recognizing and activating our capacity to manage worst-case scenarios. In ruminating about how we could be harmed or humiliated, we fail to realize how to combat, tolerate, confront, or overcome anticipated threats. Imagine yourself succeeding in its face the next time you're plagued by fear of an unwanted outcome. Maybe you do flub in the presentation, but you recover with a quick joke or pause to collect your thoughts. Maybe someone does show up at your house, but you activate 911, call a neighbor, or succeed in physically defending yourself.
5. Remember past victories. Remember past situations where you were convinced you couldn't handle something, but you did—despite your anxiety. This can help strengthen your conviction that even though you fear something will go wrong, that fear may not be entirely accurate (and therefore, your odds of success are higher than you initially thought).

The most important thing is not to let your anxiety prevent you from stepping up to challenges. The more you allow anxiety to convince you that you are inadequate or helpless—which often results in canceling plans, isolating from others, or turning down educational or career opportunities out of fear—the less likely you are to gain experiences of mastering (or at the very least: weathering) intimidating situations. Each time you face a challenge, you bank a confirmation that you can actually face and get through the hard stuff. And with each confirmation, you shore up a bit more resistance against all those little tricks the anxious brain can play on you.