Dr Katzenstein continues:
“Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of Simha, the Sephardic Initiative for mental health Awareness. We recently mentioned that anxiety is not a negative or bad emotion, but rather an internal reaction that helps us appreciate when situations or circumstances can be risky, dangerous, or important. Sometimes, however, there is a shift from normal anxiety to an anxiety disorder. (There are many types of anxiety disorders, but we're speaking more generally at this point). When do things veer from ‘normal’ anxiety to a possible indication of a disorder?
(Bear in mind that these lessons are not intended to diagnose anyone) Depending on the level of danger, risk, importance that we are exposed to, what happens internally is that there's a kind of light bulb that goes on in our brains, and the bulb’s brightness is based on the circumstance. So if a tiger is chasing us, the light bulb will be super bright. If we have a meeting with an important, potential investor, the anxiety light bulb might go to a level seven or eight. If we have a driving test, or we're getting married next week… each particular circumstance is going to determine the level of brightness of that light bulb in our head that goes on, indicating to us what we need to be prepared for.
We can learn to recognize the difference between everyday, normal anxiety versus something that might indicate a possible disorder using some examples:
-People experience anxiety and normal worry every day about things like tests, bills, relationships, but it’s an indication of a disorder if the person feels constant worry, sometimes without an obvious trigger or cause, and it interrupts their daily lives.
-Normal everyday anxiety might mean feeling discomfort in some social situations, which is actually quite common. People don't realize that a majority of us actually feel shy, uncomfortable, or anxious quite often in social situations. But it veers into an indication of a disorder when we start to avoid social gatherings or interactions out fear of feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed.
-Normal everyday anxiety can even be some level of panic before a big moment or event. If you're getting up to speak for the first time, in front of a crowd of 500 people, it's quite normal to experience a real fight or flight response, which could create a very intense level of anxiety that we'll call panic, that actually we see as a typical response to preparing for a pretty big moment.
An indication of a disorder is when we may have those kinds of attacks without a trigger or cause, and perhaps subsequently, have a perpetual fear of having another panic attack.
-One more example of every day, normal anxiety is fear of a dangerous objects or scenarios. Going back to our tiger example, there’s no such thing as a Tiger- phobia, because you're supposed to be afraid of tigers, because of their level of danger.
That's not a phobia, that's a normal fear of something that can be quite dangerous. When might it veer into an indication of a disorder? When it becomes irrational or unexplainable, and there's now a pretty intense fear of something that in reality doesn't pose any danger. So, to go back to our light bulb concept, it’s when we see a typical street cat, but our brains interpret it as if it’s a tiger.
To recap: when our physiological response interprets a situation as super- dangerous, but rationally or logically, it poses little or no danger, that’s an indication of an anxiety disorder.
Thank you.”