Free Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less by Kate Middleton Page B

are out of control. It’s much better to prevent fires than to have to fight them. The next step, therefore, is to move on and look at the patterns of thinking and belief that can be behind troublesome emotions.

8 Anxiety: fighting the fires
    Before we move on from looking at how negative emotions affect us, we need to look at one example of an emotion that we could say causes more problems than any other. This emotion is at the root of many mental health problems, including obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias, and it is even implicated in other conditions such as eating disorders and self-harm. It can cause and trigger other problems but it can also be the problem itself. It has the power to control our lives and to back us into a corner as we retreat ever further away from things that seem to make it worse. It is the only emotion to have its own category in the clinical manual used by psychologists to diagnose psychological illnesses. Most importantly, because of the hormones and chemical reactions it triggers, it is one of the emotions most strongly linked with stress. It is anxiety.
    Anxiety is a very powerful and unpleasant emotion. Of course, there are good reasons for this. If emotions in general are designed to trigger our attention, perhaps more than any other anxiety needs to be something that forces us to pay attention. Anxiety is triggered when there is a chance that a situation playing out around us will lead to an outcome that is unwanted for us or that risks something very precious to us. Anxiety can be a very intense, instant reaction that causes us to react instinctively without thinking – forexample, if we (or someone we care about) are in personal danger. Or it can be something that burns more slowly in the background: a base level of unpleasant emotion that never quite goes away.
    Anxiety can have a clear root cause and trigger. Someone who has been in a bad car accident might struggle with severe anxiety about driving a car again, suffer panic attacks when on motorways and find it takes a lot of work to get back into driving again. Just as often, however, anxiety can be apparently inexplicable, as in the case of bizarre but very powerful phobias.
    Anxiety and the worst case scenario
    The first step in understanding anxiety is to look at how it forms and at something quite unique in the way we instinctively respond to it that tends to make things much worse. At the root of any episode of anxiety is what I call the worst case scenario (WCS) – that thing that we fear might happen, that we dread happening, that we want to stop happening. So we become anxious because there is something we are worried might happen – an essential element for anxiety is uncertainty. Anxiety is triggered when our brain detects that something happening around us, or something we are doing, might be linked to increasing the risk of this WCS happening. Sometimes this is because we have had a bad experience of it happening before. Sometimes it is an automatic instinctive fear that something bad will happen. Or it has been suggested that a tendency to be scared of some things is innate – being scared of spiders or snakes, for example. We don’t know why, and we don’t have to have had a bad experience ourselves, we just knowthat something bad might happen if we go near them.
    The classic response to fear is to start straight away to avoid the thing that has been linked in our minds with the WCS. I’ll use an example from my own life to show what I mean. When I was about seven, I was stuck in a lift with my family during a power cut in a hotel in Italy. It was a pretty short experience – my parents say it actually lasted only minutes – but I still remember it vividly, and from almost that day on I started to avoid going in lifts if I possibly could. This continued right up into my twenties, by which time I only ever went in lifts if I absolutely had to. I had developed quite a