Anxiety, and Where It Tips Over

A racing heart before a big day is your alarm system doing its job. When the alarm won't reset, that's a different thing, and a treatable one.

"I have anxiety" gets said about a hundred different things: a hard week, a personality trait, a full-blown panic attack in a parking lot. All of it is real. Not all of it is the same thing.

Nobody teaches the part that would help: where ordinary nervousness ends and a condition worth treating begins.

Start here

Anxiety is an alarm system, and you're supposed to have one. When your brain reads a situation as a threat, it fires the fight-or-flight response. Your sympathetic nervous system floods you with adrenaline, your heart speeds up, your breathing goes shallow, your stomach drops. A small brain structure called the amygdala runs point on this.

That system is doing its job before a test, a first date, a car swerving into your lane. The racing heart isn't the problem. The problem is when the alarm won't switch off, or goes off when there's nothing to run from.

The line between normal and not

Three things separate everyday anxiety from an anxiety disorder. The fear is out of proportion to the actual situation. It ...