If you hear any anxiety sufferer, you’re near guaranteed to hear a few phrases: “downward spiral”, “downward circle”, “anxiety loop”, “one thing leads to another”, “can’t stop it”, “can’t break the cycle”.
When triggered, anxiety causes a messy chain reaction of events, and it happens over what feels like a split second of time. People describe the experience as both painful and confusing, “How did I go down this deep, this fast, this bad?”.
In this article, I’ll describe how the “Anxiety Loop” works, and what exactly a person is dealing with when it happens.
This article can also be considered as my answer to the question “What causes anxiety”.
(A reminder that these are just my own personal views. I’m not a medical doctor, so you should not use this commentary to self-diagnose or as a substitute for care from your medical provider).
What causes anxiety?
Anxiety is caused by a break-down in one or more of six areas: biology, mirroring, thinking and belief, behavior, conditioning and memory.
The six areas do not flow in a linear fashion. They are not a straight line. It’s not like one leads to the second, which leads to the third, and so on.
Instead, they're interconnected and interdependent. Each influences one or more of the others, and is, in turn, influenced by them. No trigger point operates in isolation. They’re all working together to make up the overall experience of anxiety.
If you have a penchant for diagrams, this is what the anxiety loop looks like.
A great analogy to understand the anxiety loop is by picturing yourself standing in front of a mirror in a room which is built with mirrored walls everywhere. So when you look at yourself in any one of those mirrors, what you will see is not one, but many other reflections of yourself.
It's the same with anxiety. There is not one thing that causes anxiety. They're six areas influencing each other that create the overall experience.
Why anxiety is so difficult to bear
It is precisely because of this loop working in this fashion, that anxiety can feel unbearable in the moment.
You’re not just slammed with one thing. Your anxiety is caused by being hit all around from everywhere possible.
To make it more difficult, the loop can start anywhere without any predictable order.
Take the first example:
Your doctor may fault your thinking style (3rd area clockwise from the top).
"You think with errors, that's why you have anxiety. Think correctly."
But you know that something is missing in that statement.
It's not just the thoughts, but also the horrifying dread you feel which is hard to comprehend.
"If the thought is irrational, why do I feel so scared? And if it's all in my head, why can't I control it?"
You're not crazy.
That dread is because your amygdala falsely fired up (1st area from the top), instantly causing painful symptoms to explode in your body.
This is a real thing, not some imaginary hokey-pokey that you made up. If your doctor doesn't explain the amygdala, you will be left further terrified by the loss of conscious control over your own biology.
By the way, why does the amygdala fire up?
The amygdala itself responds to many things, including current thoughts (3rd area clockwise), but also past memory (6th area clockwise). In this moment , your thought could be powered by the emotional memories of anxiety associated with this thought.
And we can agree that your memories aren't exactly nice. They were formed because of what you did in the past at that moment when you faced your triggers.
What you did then was in turn decided by your thinking, behavior and conditioning at that time (3rd, 4th and 5th area clockwise).
What this means is that even though today, you rationally know this thought to be irrational, your amygdala doesn't because of past anxious memories feeding into it. In other words, your past causes your anxiety today.
Take another example:
If your parent is anxious, as a child, you've been mirroring anxious behaviors (2nd area clockwise). You literally may have had no exposure to alternative styles that did not include catastrophe.
Pretty soon, that becomes your own conditioning.
This means that your memories of yourself dealing with triggers, could be filled with worry and fear.
If this is true, your amygdala has generally been conditioned to be on high alert, even though you may say there is nothing to rationally fear in the moment.
Think about it. Do you frequently walk around feeling mild-to-moderate stress in your body?
Unless you understand how memory influences symptoms, you will be left confused over why you feel dread and doom when you have no present reason to.
Soon, you will hunt for it, which unfortunately once again means indulging in distorted thinking and behavior, because of your conditioning to worry and stress.
It really does feel like literally being stuck in a viscous loop.
But of course, you are not stuck.
You can break the anxiety loop. But part of being able to do that is by understanding how this messy and entangling loop works in the first place.
Anxiety Loop deep-dive
As I shared earlier, there really is no static starting point to the loop. Anxiety can be triggered at any point and this can change across experiences. But to take this discussion forward, let’s assume the starting point is at the top of the loop.
Cause of Anxiety #1 - Stress, Amygdala and Biology
Universally, most recognize that there are some events that are capable of causing some serious trauma and stress.
Death of a loved one, domestic violence, sexual assault, bankruptcy, war, getting fired from a job, losing your home, divorce and poverty.
If these events come true for us, we get a big shock to our otherwise balanced state of equilibrium.
But even low-grade, continuing stresses of life can also add up to something significant. At some point, they can become chronic stress.
For example, if your family was physically, verbally, psychologically or emotionally abusive, it may have resulted in your experience of complex-trauma (feel free to read the work of Dr Bessel Van der Kolk and Pete Walker).
The result of stress, particularly cumulative and prolonged stress over the years, is an altered brain.
Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline alter the brain structure over time from normal to hyper-vigilant.
Parts of the brain (particularly the amygdala) react in quick, automatic and unconscious ways, pumping your body with chemicals and hormones to prepare you to fight-or-flight your problems. Panic attacks are often described as caused by the result of this, although I don’t fully agree with that.
Examples of these physiological reactions in the body include an accelerated heart rate, tense muscles, difficulty breathing and much more. This is nature preparing your body to fight or flee.
This can save your life if you're confronting a physical threat. I need my heart thumping rapidly to get enough oxygen to my muscles so I run away fast from a bear.
However, these symptoms are uncomfortable when the dangers are more psychological. If someone steals my car, I want my body to cooperate with me, so I can calmly think about my options. An uncoordinated body and mind will only make it worse.
Up to this point, what you are experiencing is biology. If correctly understood and interpreted, you can stop the downward spiral to anxiety, usually by using some somatic tools to regulate your nervous system.
But if biology is not correctly understood, these visceral bodily reactions can leave you terrified from feeling these symptoms.
Cause of Anxiety #2 - Mirroring
So did you understand your stress correctly?
Who was around you to explain what was happening? In fact, who were you generally role modeling?
If those around you, particularly in childhood, had catastrophic styles or were themselves dangerous, then a big part of your anxious response styles may have been learned from them or learned in order to adapt to them.
It makes sense why research then shows how a child of an anxious parent is 2-7 times more likely to develop an anxiety condition. If left untreated and unchecked, the child is more likely to experience depression symptoms as well (see footnote for research link).
While someone can sit here as an adult and understand their parent or caretaker with objectivity and distance, they must appreciate that as child, they could not, because to a child, their world is their parent.
Cause of Anxiety #3 - Thinking and Belief
We now rely heavily on our own mind to solve our problems. Mirroring in childhood may have meant that you learnt distorted styles, but nonetheless, see if you can consider that they are yours now.
When our own rational, higher brain is not able to soothe and override our emotional brain, the spiral downwards can be quick and steep.
This is not a reflection of your emotional brain because the emotional brain is designed to operate subconsciously.
But the higher brain (the prefrontal cortex) is supposed to interpret our experiences with rationality, objectivity and good sense.
In anxiety, the rational brain is not doing its job very well because it engages in thinking distortions. These are styles of thinking which aren’t helpful, even if the person has limited awareness of how exactly so.
Common thinking distortions that create or intensify anxiety symptoms can include magical thinking, thought-action fusion, perfectionism and control, black and white thinking, catastrophic thinking, should-thinking, hyper-vigilance, over-generalization and more. In later posts, I’ll elaborate on these.
Cause of Anxiety #4 - Behavior
And since behavior is closely linked with thinking, if we think distortedly, we are likely to behave distortedly.
In anxiety, the chosen behaviors tend to be such that they further perpetuate anxiety. These behaviors usually make us get into avoidance or excessive reassurance patterns.
This does not always happen overnight. It happens insidiously, making it harder in the moment to see how they’re leading you into a downward spiral.
Keep in mind that when you start performing behaviors to reassure distorted thoughts, you give your thoughts a strong message that they have power, authority and control over you.
Cause of Anxiety #5 - Conditioning
With each such experience of unproductive thoughts and subsequent behaviors, you are now conditioning yourself as someone who responds to triggers with obsessive, compulsive, anxious behaviors. In time, these labels start to resonate: worrier, neurotic, type A.
Cause of Anxiety #6 - Memory
All your experiences are captured in the brain as memory.
If you have too many experiences of yourself as struggling with anxiety, then those become your memories.
And since memories also trigger the amygdala, even when one faces no current threats, current conflicts or current dangers, one is still triggered with anxiety symptoms from past memories.
And so it goes on
A triggered amygdala now relies on thinking and behavior for reassurance, which as we’re seeing, can be distorted.
Can you see where this is going? Round and round we go in the anxiety loop.
How to break the loop and start overcoming anxiety
I’ve written about it in this post.
Footnote
1."With regard to anxiety, 68% of children of parents with this disorder show symptoms of an actual anxiety disorder. Furthermore, these children are two to seven times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder compared to children of parents without an anxiety disorder" (Sanne PA Rasing et al. "Effectiveness of depression and anxiety prevention in adolescents with high familial risk", Nov 2013)