{"id":643,"date":"2021-05-21T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/?p=643"},"modified":"2021-05-22T16:29:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-22T20:29:49","slug":"mental-health-awareness-part-2-fear-anxiety-and-panic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/21\/mental-health-awareness-part-2-fear-anxiety-and-panic\/","title":{"rendered":"Mental Health Awareness Month: Part 2\u2014Fear, Anxiety, and Panic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Has your anxiety increased in the last year? If so, you\u2019re not alone. Over the past year, the social, personal, and environmental stressors of the pandemic have caused a dramatic increase<\/a> in the prevalence of mental disorders\u2014most commonly anxiety and depression. We discussed depression last week<\/a>, so we know that environmental triggers can worsen or even cause episodes of depression. Perhaps even more than mood disorders, anxiety disorders are strongly impacted by social and psychological context. Anxiety disorders\u2014which include phobias, panic disorders, and trauma disorders\u2014are innately tied to our sense of self-preservation. Evolutionarily speaking, an attuned sense of fear and avoidance can be essential to keeping you safe. But when these instincts spiral out of proportion, they can become crippling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re probably familiar with the feeling of anxiety\u2014the sweating palms, racing heartbeat, and feeling of unease that hangs over you before a big presentation or a job interview. Anxiety is an innately physiological<\/a> response to a perceived threat. Thousands of years ago, those threats were mostly external, life-or-death situations\u2014hungry predators, dangerous weather, or other hostile humans. In these uncertain environments, evolution favored people with a healthy sense of anxiety whose bodies would prepare them to run or defend themselves as soon as a threat appeared. But today, for many of us, our main sources of anxiety are much less dire. Giving a presentation in front of a hundred people isn\u2019t going to kill us, but our bodies seem determined to gear up for a fight that will never come (unless someone in the crowd happens to hold a particularly strong grudge). Our lives have become divorced from the wild and dangerous world of our ancestors, but even all these centuries later, we\u2019ve managed to hold onto the same primal fear that kept them alive.<\/p>\n\n\n