Chapter 2

Finding Out the Common Causes of Anxiety

In this chapter, I explore some of the more common causes of anxiety. Although no particular formula yet explains how anxiety arises in some adults, genetics, stress, environment and upbringing all play a role.

Even everyday living can play a part in affecting your anxiety. Just by making small changes, you may be able to decrease your stress, making your life a little easier and your anxiety more manageable.

Exploring Common Causes of Anxiety

Many different factors can contribute to your anxiety. You may recognize some of them as connecting to your personal experiences, and you may not. Sometimes anxiety can appear with no known reason, and sometimes you can easily identify its origin. Whether your anxiety has a known cause or not, you can still apply mindfulness throughout this book in the same way.

As you read this chapter, bear in mind that identifying with any of the experiences I mention doesn't mean you're doomed (doomed, I say, doomed!) to a lifetime of anxiety holding you prisoner. Anxiety is one of the most common mental health conditions, and many people may have had some of the same experiences you've had or are having. The fact is that you can manage your anxiety.

Anxiety in itself is a natural human emotion that everyone experiences from time to time. When I refer to anxiety, I'm talking about ongoing feelings of anxiety that negatively impact your ability to function in your work or home life.

Discovering your biology and your anxiety

Some research suggests that anxiety may be genetic in origin. You may notice that others in your immediate family or family tree have anxiety. But you can also have anxiety when no one else in your family does so. Anxiety is difficult to research because it can also be caused by other external factors that you and your family may all experience, such as difficult family relationships, low income or trauma of any kind.

Studies do show, however, that if you develop anxiety before the age of 20, close relatives, such as a parent or sibling, are more likely to have anxiety as well. In the case of twins, if one has a panic disorder, the other is more likely to develop a similar problem, too.

Experts haven't yet identified a specific gene that can cause anxiety. Other people with similar genes to you may not have developed anxiety because external factors, such as their environment, may be different. Much more research needs to be done to prove the genetic link and apply it to common therapies for anxiety.

The good news is that your brain and mind are malleable and can be trained. By using the meditations in this book, you can change your relationship with anxiety.

Finding out the stress factor

Some stress is normal. Everyone needs a little bit of stress to keep motivated and plan for the future. But chronic stress eventually leads to anxiety.

Chronic stress is basically emotional pressure that you endure for a long period of time and over which you feel you have no control. External factors that can lead to chronic stress are

Lots of different issues can cause chronic stress, and sometimes you may not have a clear cause for it.

Internal factors can also cause chronic stress, such as not getting enough sleep, not having a nutritious diet and using illegal drugs or excessive amounts of alcohol to mute your stress.

These behaviours simply stop you from having a good coping mechanism to manage stress. Coping skills are vitally important when handling stress, and the use of drugs and high alcohol levels suppress them so that they don't work.

You can manage stress by changing your habits and lifestyle and by using meditation. Small changes, such as diet, sleep and making time for yourself, can make a big difference. Be kind to yourself and remember that you deserve not to be under constant stress – just like everyone else! Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it and try not to take on too much in your home and working life. See Chapter 9 for more on healthy habits for better well-being.

Thinking causes most anxiety

Most anxiety is generated internally by your thinking – which doesn't mean that it's your fault! The human brain works in such a way that falling into negative thinking patterns is easy; it's the brain's vivid imagination about possible negative scenarios running away with itself.

Negative or worrying thoughts can spiral into a consistent stream of unhelpful thoughts, triggered by just one event. This behaviour is called rumination. Being a little worried about, say, your finances, an upcoming exam or starting a new job is perfectly normal, but if it becomes more severe than that, worrying rumination can adversely affect your life. Mindfulness training can help with rumination because it trains you to stay in the here and now rather than obsessing about future events,

Taking more severe anxiety as an example, you can see how normal events and thoughts that accompany those events can spiral out of control and cause anxiety. Check out the exact same scenarios in Tables 2-1 and 2-2 and compare the thoughts of people who don't have an anxiety condition (Table 2-1) with those who do (Table 2-2).

The scenarios or external events are exactly the same, but the thinking in Table 2-2 can cause anxiety because the unhelpful thoughts can spiral out of control.

The good news is that mindfulness can help you identify anxious thinking patterns and so stop your thoughts spiralling. It can also help you to lose any self-identification with your anxious thoughts and be able to manage them more effectively. Check out Chapter 4 for more on this topic.

Understanding the Influences Affecting Your Anxiety

Identifying any social and emotional influences that may be contributing to your anxiety gives you a starting point to apply your mindfulness practice.

Considering the effect of childhood experience

Some childhood experiences can contribute to anxiety conditions in adults. Although the specific causes of anxiety aren't known, a link does exist between what happens in childhood and developing anxiety as an adult. If you had a parent with anxiety, for example, you're more likely to experience anxiety yourself. But whether that's down to a genetic link, you copying the anxious behaviour of the adult as a child or a mixture of both is still unclear.

Other childhood experiences that can cause anxiety are alcoholism in the family, child abuse, an overly critical parent, an overly protective parent, suppression of a child's feelings and separation from a parent. The more of these experiences a child is exposed to, the greater the risk of that child developing an anxiety disorder as an adult.

No doubt you can see where the anxiety stems from in some of these experiences. For example, in the case of an overly protective parent, the child grows up learning to fear the world and not being able to handle adversity, which, of course, is a normal part of life. In the case of an overly critical parent, the child grows up fearing that he can do nothing right and therefore develops anxiety.

The good news is that the human brain isn't static and rigid; you can change and reprogramme it. You can unlearn any negative childhood conditioning with time, practice and patience.

Exploring self-perception's impact on anxiety

Your self-perception – that is, how you see yourself and what you think and feel about yourself – is vitally important. Most people are unaware of the stream of thoughts that go through their head every day and the kind of self-talk that they're inadvertently listening to.

For example, do you find yourself berating yourself for little things that go wrong in your life and blaming yourself for everything? In the case of social anxiety, you may automatically jump to conclusions about what other people think of you. When you're in a social situation, you assume that they're thinking the worst of you, judging your looks, clothing and behaviour as if something's wrong with you.

The thoughts that cause this kind of negative self-talk aren't factual, of course. When you become aware of your thinking patterns with mindfulness, you can make better decisions on how to behave, react and gain more confidence.

Most people are their own worst critics. You need to accept that just because you see yourself in a certain way that doesn't mean everybody else does, too. It's just your thoughts that make it seem so. (See the nearby sidebar ‘It's a branch! No, it's a rope! Nonsense, it's a pipe!’ for an illustration of this subjective experience.)

Refusing to identify yourself with anxiety

You may identify with your anxiety by saying things such as ‘I am anxious’ or ‘I am an anxious person’. In fact, you may often identify emotions as part of you instead of part of your experience.

The truth is that you are not your anxiety; it's only part of your experience, just as reading this chapter in this book is part of your experience. The body is a vessel in which thoughts and emotions come and go. You may house them for a little while, but they don't belong to you.

Religions such as Buddhism call this tendency to identify with your thoughts attachment. They suggest that instead you phrase such feelings as ‘I'm with anxiety’ rather than ‘I am anxious’. Try it!

The problem with seeing your anxiety as part of you and not just part of your experience is that you further intensify it. For example, if you're going to visit your doctor for a simple checkup but have convinced yourself that you may have a life-threatening condition even though no evidence supports this thought, you can experience as much anxiety as if you did have a life-threatening condition. Similarly, if you're sitting on a plane and you experience some turbulence and you think ‘The plane is going to crash’, you may experience the same anxious thoughts and feelings as if the plane was going to crash!

You can read more about seeing yourself as separate from your anxious thoughts and feelings in Chapter 1's discussion on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and cognitive defusion.

Enjoying the benefits of socialising

Human beings are social animals, and lots of studies show that becoming social can improve your well-being. In modern-day living, people have smaller social circles and are often surrounded by fewer siblings and cousins, for example, because generally people tend to have smaller families.

The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family and the busy lives of nuclear families have all contributed to this.

People with few friends and limited social contact, such as not having a friendship network, may struggle with mental health problems such as anxiety. They don't have anyone to provide emotional support after suffering a stressful event, such as a job loss or bereavement.

Certain studies show that women suffering from an anxiety disorder who had positive social interactions, better access to information, help and emotional support generally had better psychological well-being. Other studies also show that women with someone to talk to after experiencing a stressful event are far less likely to develop a mental health condition, such as depression.

Being more social (whether conversing with acquaintances or engaging in friendship groups) also increases your brain's ability to process thoughts. Such interaction requires more concentration from you, more listening, maintaining a good memory and knowing when to reply in conversations.

Social engagement outside the family circle tends to have additional benefits because when you experience stress at home, receiving external emotional support is more beneficial.

Realising How Modern-Day Living Can Affect Your Anxiety

Living today is often fast-paced and instant, with people being bombarded with information every day in the form of words and images. But if you stop to analyse all this information, you soon discover that some of it is unnecessary and serves no purpose for you.

The overuse of certain technology and constant information can cause anxiety. Living a modern lifestyle without using it is difficult, however. In this section, I suggest ways to limit your use for less anxiety and better well-being.

Stopping negative media from affecting your anxiety

You absorb a lot of information day-to-day without even realising whether it's negative or positive. Thousands of good deeds happen in the world every day and yet go widely unreported and unnoticed: huge events such as scientific breakthroughs and cures for diseases, plus loads of small instances, such as a community coming together to do something good.

In November 2013 in San Francisco, the whole city was changed into Gotham City so that an ill little boy could fulfil his wish to be Batman for the day!

This story was reported, but most good deeds aren't. If you watch the news morning and night and read newspapers, you can easily come to believe that the whole world is negative and a horrible place to live.

Absorbing negative media all the time can affect your anxiety because you may start to fear events on the TV happening to you and lay awake worrying about them.

If you're very anxious, avoid the negative news until you feel a bit better. If you can't do that, try not to watch it first thing in the morning because that sets up your day and last thing at night because you need to relax your body into sleeping mode. Also, stop reading beauty magazines because the unrealistic airbrushed images in them are unhelpful to self-acceptance and self-compassion, which is what you need to develop as part of managing your anxiety.

Another option instead of the mainstream news is to go online to www.TED.com, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to only hosting inspirational talks by people who are positively contributing to the world.

Reducing the adverse impact of technology on your anxiety

You may love your smartphone and browsing the Internet for hours on Facebook and Twitter, but doing so can cause anxiety and exacerbate existing anxiety conditions. Some studies show that the use of social media can heighten anxiety for two main reasons:

Social media can be very helpful if you're suffering from an anxiety condition, of course, because of all the many great communities and resources you can access online. But if you're suffering from anxiety, it's best to cut your social media online time down to just 30 minutes a day.

Everyone puts out on social media the image that they want you to see, not all the bad stuff. Therefore, you can easily think that everyone else has a perfect life except you, which isn't true!

Your phone can also cause anxiety. Having it switched on all day, where anyone can access you at any time, can be stressful because (like the phone!) you don't get to switch off and are constantly available. When a work email comes through, you feel compelled to answer it at any time of the day and night. Anxiety is caused by the demands of technology on you, when in fact it should help alleviate your stress.

Try combating this problem by switching off your phone for a couple of hours every evening. In that time, you can read, play with your children or do some of the exercises and meditations in this book undisturbed!