What is heightened anxiety?

Anxiety is a negatively colored emotion that expresses a feeling of uncertainty, anticipation of negative events, and hard-to-define feelings of foreboding.

Unlike the causes of fear, the causes of anxiety are usually not realized, but it prevents a person from engaging in potentially harmful behavior or prompts him or her to take action to increase the probability of a favorable outcome of events. Anxiety is associated with the unconscious mobilization of the body's mental forces to overcome a potentially dangerous situation.

Anxiety is a vague, prolonged and vague fear about future events. It arises in situations where there is not yet (and may not be) real danger to the person, but the person is waiting for it and is not yet clear how to cope with it. According to some researchers, anxiety is a combination of several emotions - fear, sadness, shame and guilt.

Anxiety (and many forms of fear) in most cases is characterized by the following train of thought: a person finds examples of unfavorable or dangerous events in his past or from his environment, and then carries these experiences into his future.

For example, when a person sees a dog in the distance, he remembers that he has once been bitten by a dog, and he has a fear of such a situation happening again. Or once an official was reprimanded by his superior. Now, when he walks into the chief's office, he experiences intense fear in anticipation of another failure. At the same time, the person may experience fear and anxiety about events that happened not to him or her, but to other people or were made up in general.

Sometimes this formation mechanism leads to absurd fears, which nevertheless have a very strong negative impact on the human psyche. Many people cannot sleep because of fear after watching a thriller or a horror movie at night. At the same time, they realize that the movie was just a figment of the writer and director's imagination, and that the monsters were the result of computer graphics or the skillful acting of the made-up actors, but they still continue to experience anxiety.

Sufficiently expressed anxiety includes two components:

• awareness of physiological sensations (palpitations, sweating, nausea, etc.);
• the awareness of the very fact of anxiety.

Anxiety is sometimes intensified by feelings of shame ("Others will see that I am afraid"). An important aspect of "anxious" thinking is its selectivity: the subject tends to choose certain topics from his or her environment and ignore others in order to prove that he or she is right in viewing the situation as frightening, or, conversely, that his or her anxiety is vain and unjustified. Anxiety can cause confusion and disturbances in the perception of not only time and space, but also people and the meaning of events.

Fear and anxiety, according to some authors, have only quantitative differences, and according to others, differ fundamentally, both in their mechanisms and in the way they are realized. According to the first authors, if the source of anxiety cannot be eliminated, anxiety turns into fear. For example, according to Carroll Isard, the primary and independent emotion is fear, and anxiety is a combination of several emotions: fear, sadness, guilt and shame. Most authors tend to view anxiety as a reaction to an unspecified, often unknown signal, and fear as a response to a specific danger signal.

Many researchers establish between anxiety and fear a number of basic distinctions concerning both the origin of these phenomena and their manifestations. Thus, anxiety can be considered occurring usually long before the onset of danger, while fear is considered occurring at its onset or shortly before it. The source of fear is usually considered realized and having quite a concrete character (an angry dog, an impending examination, a threatening boss), whereas the source of anxiety is subconscious or not amenable to a logical explanation. Anxiety can be associated with a general arousal of the body (in particular, the sympathetic nervous system), and fear - with inhibition of activity and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, and in high doses even with paralysis of the person. Anxiety may be considered projected into the future, and the source of fear may be past psychotraumatic experiences. And, finally, it is possible to consider that anxiety is socially conditioned and that fear is based on biological instincts.

In most cases, all of these differences between fear and anxiety are not derived experimentally, but are set at the level of definitions by the researchers themselves. This is due primarily to the fact that most people (and hence the subjects in the experiments) have very different (if any) ideas about the differences between anxiety and fear, and may call the same feeling differently, and different feelings the same way.

It was found, that anxiety, as such, is not only a negative personality trait, provoking more frequent, compared with the norm, experiencing the emotion of fear, and in certain situations can even be useful for the individual and the performance of his social functions. It turned out that "highly anxious" people better cope with the performance of not very difficult logical tasks, but difficult tasks are better solved by "non-anxious" subjects. Thus, anxiety clearly has adaptive functions, warning of external or internal danger, telling the body that it is necessary to take the necessary measures to prevent danger or mitigate its consequences. These measures can be conscious (for example, preparation for an exam) or, mainly, unconscious (defense mechanisms).

As studies by Bernard Weiner and Kurt Schneider have shown, activity success in "anxious" and "non-anxious" individuals varies according to different conditions. In anxious individuals, performance increased to a greater extent when they were told that they were successful, while "non-anxious" subjects were much more stimulated by reports of failure in trial experiments, especially when it came to difficult tasks. The authors conclude from these experiments that it is desirable to encourage those who fear possible failure to report successes (even minor ones) in the intermediate stages of work, while those who are initially focused on success are more motivated by information about failures during the task.

People differ significantly among themselves in their level of anxiety. In order to measure such individual differences, in 1953 in the United States Janet Taylor created a technique called the "Taylor Anxiety Scale" by cutting the MMPI. Over time, it became clear to researchers that there are two types of anxiety: one as a more or less stable personality trait and the other as an individual's reaction to a threatening situation. Although these two types of anxiety are quite separate categories, there is a certain connection between them. As Heinz Heckhausen points out, under the influence of disturbing and threatening circumstances (pain, stress, threat to social status, etc.) the differences between high- and low-anxiety people are sharper. Fear of failure has a particularly strong influence on the behavior of individuals prone to high anxiety, so such individuals are particularly sensitive to messages of failure that worsen their performance. In contrast, feedback from information about success (even fictional success) stimulates such individuals, increasing their performance.

To better distinguish between personality and situational anxiety, Charles Spielberger created two questionnaires: one to measure personality anxiety and one to assess situational (reactive) anxiety, designating the former as a "T-property" and the latter as a "T-state. Personality anxiety is a more permanent category and is determined by the type of higher nervous activity, temperament, character, upbringing and acquired response strategies to external factors. Situational anxiety depends more on current problems and experiences - for example, before an important event, most people have significantly higher anxiety than in normal situations. As a rule, measures of personal and situational anxiety are interconnected: people with high measures of personal anxiety exhibit greater situational anxiety in similar situations. This correlation is especially pronounced in situations that threaten a person's self-esteem. On the other hand, in situations that cause pain or contain other physical threats, individuals with high levels of personality anxiety do not exhibit any particularly pronounced situational anxiety. But if the anxiety-provoking situation involves others questioning an individual's self-esteem or authority, differences in the level of situational anxiety manifest themselves to the maximum extent. Researchers have shown that the more emphatically the connection between the task being performed and the test of an individual's ability is emphasized, the worse the "high anxiety" subjects cope with it and the better the "low anxiety" subjects perform it. Thus, increased anxiety, due to the fear of possible failure, is an adaptive mechanism that increases the individual's responsibility in the face of social demands and attitudes. At the same time, the negative negative emotions that accompany anxiety are the "price" that an individual has to pay for an increased ability to respond sensitively and, ultimately, to better adapt to social requirements and norms.