Areas › Worry and anxiety › What worry does
Anxiety is not a malfunction. The alarm is doing what it was built to do, which is get you ready for something, and the trouble usually starts with how long it stays on rather than with the fact that it switched on.
If you have decided that every flicker of anxiety is proof something is broken in you, you end up fighting your own body, and that fight lays a second layer of worry on top of the first. Let the first wave be ordinary. Notice it, ask what it is trying to get you ready for, and then see whether it needs any more of your time. Often it does not.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops (Quran 2:155). Fear is named in advance as part of the road, so feeling it is not evidence that something has gone uniquely wrong with you.
وَلَنَبۡلُوَنَّكُم بِشَيۡءࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡخَوۡفِ وَٱلۡجُوعِ وَنَقۡصࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰلِ وَٱلۡأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops. But [Prophet], give good news to those who are steadfast
Qur’an 2:155read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An influential review of what researchers call perseverative cognition argues that worry and rumination keep stress related activation in the body going long after the stressful event has passed, which is how a mental habit turns into a physical load. It is the carrying on, not the initial response, that the review points at. This is a review of an argument and the evidence for it rather than a single trial, so read it as a well supported way of thinking rather than a settled fact.
Brosschot JF, Gerin W, Thayer JF. (2006). The perseverative cognition hypothesis: a review of worry, prolonged stress-related physiological activation, and health.. Journal of psychosomatic research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Treating the alarm as normal stops you adding a second alarm about having the first one.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When the alarm takes over, the reasoning part of you goes quiet for a while. That is not you losing your mind. It comes back on its own.
Listen to the tone, not only the content. Sorrow and flat negativity about someone's online world can be the clearest reading of their mood you will get.
Your alarm learned from something real, then started answering to things that merely resemble it. A rustle in the grass gets the same jolt as the animal that first taught you to run.