On Anxiety and Panic Disorders
Image: Justice for All
A core emotion like fear calms down once we’re no longer threatened or in danger. Symptoms like trembling or sweating release or dissipate. We may use relaxation techniques to help in our recovery, but even without we return to our daily life as usual — and there’re no lasting ill effects. In other words, we’ve “reverse engineered” the fear response.
With anxiety, as NAMI blogger Hilary Hendel writes, there’s no reverse engineering without cognitive intervention. We must consciously, intentionally calm ourselves down — it’s not automatic, like fear. As Hender contends, we can succeed at calming ourselves only by identifying the core emotions beneath the anxiety — whether the anxiety springs from anger, sadness, excitement, or too much joy. For example:
Max gets hit with a jolt every time his boss assigns a task. Not fear, but fear-induced anxiety — because doing his job is not dangerous to survival. When Max was a boy, his mother humiliated and punished him for making mistakes. His adult mind equates tasks with being shamed, which triggers his anxiety.
Emotional, mental (psychological), and physical health are inextricable. It may not occur to us we’re feeling anxious and scared, because our symptoms are physical. It also may not occur to us because we feel emotions like anger or sadness, but not fear or nervousness. We risk not treating our anxiety by looking in all the wrong places — which, in turn, can hurt our emotional, mental, and physical health. This can affect us both in the short term (Max, breaking into a sweat at his desk) or long term (Max burnt out ten years from now). In a later post, I’ll talk about the physical and behavioral consequences of untreated anxiety.
Evolution as a Tinkerer, Not an Engineer
Nobel laureate Francois Jacob said in 1977 that “evolution is a tinkerer, rather than an engineer…[Evolution] gives his materials unexpected functions to produce a new object. From an old bicycle wheel, he makes a roulette; from a broken chair the cabinet of a radio.” In just this way “evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists.” —Psychiatrist John S. Price, Brighton General Hospital, UK, authoring a paper, “Evolutionary Aspects of Anxiety Disorders,” in PubMed Central
In her article, Julia Layton talks of the great evolutionist Charles Darwin, who experimented with his own fear response. At the zoo, “trying to remain perfectly calm, he stood as close to the glass as possible while a puff adder lunged toward him on the other side. Every time it happened, he grimaced and jumped back. In his diary, Darwin wrote, ‘My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.’ He concluded that the entire fear response is an ancient instinct that has been untouched by the nuances of modern civilization.”
Other factors involved in fear go beyond instinct, and here we are unique within the animal kingdom. Layton writes:
Image: Vecteezy
The significance of understanding evolution as a tinkerer, working through natural selection of what’s already there — rather than inventing it anew — is to explain Price’s thesis for the evolutionary role of anxiety disorders.
“If natural selection worked like an engineer — starting with a blank slate and an unlimited range of materials, designing a blueprint in advance to produce the best possible structure — then the result might indeed be perfection,” he writes.
In fact, natural selection is a lot quirkier. Intelligence developed in successive stages of primates leading to early humans and to us. But intelligence could’ve developed from, let’s say, the frog, and then intelligent life would privilege green skin and buggy eyes, with great jumping skills.
It’s worth sticking with Price’s conclusions to explain anxiety disorders [paraphrased]:
- Anxiety’s role in avoiding harm is clear — easier than figuring out other psychopathologies.
- Yet, anxiety is more difficult to analyze than depression — a simple, primitive defeated or submissive strategy.
- Anxiety is a complex mixture of cognitive, affective, behavioral, and somatic (bodily) components — and with other aspects of motivation, such as arousal.
In this complex portrait of anxiety, Price points to six evolutionary polarities:
Modular vs nonmodular: Because evolution is a tinkerer rather than an engineer, there is no clear separation between different anxiety responses or the situations that cause them.
Danger may give rise to fight, or flight, or freezing or jealousy or washing or checking or to the construction of fall-out shelters, and all of these activities are accompanied by the dysphoric affect of anxiety. —John Price, PubMed Central
Social vs nonsocial: We don’t submit to predators, so depression’s role is entirely social in its submissive display to other humans. In contrast, anxiety must keep us safe from nonsocial AND social dangers. With agoraphobia, it’s difficult to know how much anxiety saved our ancestors from people rather than from predators.
Energizer vs paralyzer: Anxiety motivates us to escape danger and avoid social disgrace. Yet too much anxiety impairs performance and may impede attempts to escape or avoid danger.
Action vs training: Anxiety actively avoids immediate danger (action), but also automatically triggers a response to learn how to avoid danger in the future (training). This training aspect appears to have been “primed” by evolution to favor predictors of anxious situations.
Emotion vs mood: Like depression, anxiety results from specific brain functions reflecting the difference between anxious emotion (worry about something, feel better when it resolves) and anxious mood (unfocused or self-focused, indifferent to environmental change).
Response to outside vs internal events: We plan ahead, so we can predict we’re about to do something dangerous or aggressive — and predict a dangerous response from a more powerful person or group. Due to repression as a part of socialization, our early planning may be unconscious — so we’re unsure what caused the anxiety. This is called signal anxiety.
Signal Anxiety
Illustration: Alamy
Signal anxiety was Freud’s way of rethinking what anxiety does. Earlier, he believed anxiety was something that resulted from repression —something unpleasant gets pushed out of awareness, and anxiety follows. Later, he reversed this idea: anxiety comes first. It acts as a warning, and that warning is what leads the mind to use repression and other defenses.
In this newer view, anxiety isn’t just a byproduct — it’s anticipatory. It’s the mind trying to get ahead of danger.
Freud illustrated this with early development. An infant doesn’t only feel distress after losing a caregiver; over time, the anxiety begins to arise in anticipation of that loss — like, fearing the withdrawal of the caregiver’s love. That shift marks an key step: anxiety moves from being a reaction to something that already happened to a signal about what might happen.
A useful modern analogy is a check engine light. Signal anxiety is the mind’s early warning that something may be going wrong internally or relationally. If the warning is understood, it can guide adaptive responses. But often, the driver (the conscious mind) doesn’t recognize the signal, misinterprets it, or ignores it altogether. When that happens, the mind recruits defense mechanisms to prevent the situation from escalating into something more overwhelming.
At this stage, anxiety may still be relatively subtle — perhaps a racing heart, a sense of unease, or difficulty focusing. It hasn’t yet become full-blown panic. Signal anxiety is predictive and manageable, but it is often misunderstood, which is why it can still lead to maladaptive responses.
Although the term signal anxiety is not widely used today, the core idea has endured. Modern neuroscience describes similar processes: the brain’s threat-detection systems — particularly in regions like the amygdala and broader limbic system —continuously scan for potential danger and generate anticipatory signals before we are consciously aware of them.
Contemporary therapies also reflect this shift. In approaches like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), anxiety is treated not as something to eliminate, but as a signal to notice and relate to differently — something that can be observed without immediately reacting. In cognitive science, attentional control theory similarly frames anxiety as a signal that the brain’s goal-directed focus is being disrupted, increasing vulnerability to distraction.
Across these perspectives, the common thread remains: anxiety is not just a symptom. It’s an early warning system — one that can guide us, mislead us, or overwhelm us, depending on how it’s interpreted and managed.
When Anxiety Is No Longer a Normal Response to Stress
In a podcast hosted by the American Psychological Association (APA) on the role of emotions in driving anxiety disorders, Bummi Olatunji, director of Vanderbilt University’s Emotion and Anxiety Research Lab, discussed how to recognize the difference between feeling anxious and an anxiety disorder — and to know when it’s time to seek help. Speaking to the transition from normal, adaptive anxiety to clinical anxiety, he asks the following questions [paraphrased]:
- How much do our anxiety experiences interfere with our ability to function?
- Are they getting in the way of our ability to hold a job?
- Are they getting in the way of how social we are in the way we want to be?
- Are they interfering with our ability to function within our family systems?
The question of whether or not these things are clinical levels of anxiety is predicated upon the extent to which they interfere with our ability to live the life we want to live. —Bummi Olatunji, research scientist/clinical psychologist, Vanderbilt University
Anxiety and Vulnerability Factors
Scientists who study anxiety disorders believe them to be caused by a complex interaction of biopsychosocial or vulnerability factors. This is explained in PubMed by Swiss clinical psychopharmacologist Thierry Steimer. He discusses the work of a fellow scientist who developed the concept of three, interrelated vulnerability factors that give rise to anxiety disorders. The three vulnerabilities are:
- Biological/genetic, developing from an innate predisposition or from something that happened (trauma, illness)
- General psychological, mostly coming from early life experience — leading to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
- Specific psychological, focusing on particular events or situations — leading to social anxiety disorder (SAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorders, and specific phobias
Steimer refers to these vulnerabilities as “predisposing factors, either innate or acquired,” which affect our ability to regulate our emotions or cope well. Predisposing factors also determine our coping styles, which play a big role in how vulnerable we are to developing disorders. Being hungry, tired, having money problems, or having a history of trauma are all vulnerability factors.
Here’s my simplified take on this profound and relevant point: For various reasons — whether innate or learned — we’ve developed individual differences in how well we deal with our emotions and our ability to cope. This, in turn, affects how vulnerable we are to developing mental disorders.
In Sum: Anxiety vs Anxiety Disorder
I’ve summarized conclusions drawn from multiples sources, primarily PubMed Central, PubMed, American Psychological Association (APA), and World Health Organization:
- Anxiety, like fear, is fundamental to our (evolutionary) wiring to recognize danger. We need anxiety to detect, assess, and prepare for threats. But without conscious thought, we can’t reverse engineer anxiety like we can automatically with fear.
- “Pathologically excessive” anxiety is collateral damage to common adaptive anxiety — as typically experienced by most people. Like an evolutionary “oops,” anxiety becoming anxiety disorder had adaptive functions in ancient times, just not so much now.
- Anxiety is the result of evolution as a tinkerer not an engineer. It evolved to save us from danger, but natural selection primed anxiety to predict danger as much as elude it. This is simpler to see than to analyze, since it takes in a complex of cognitive, affective, behavioral, somatic (bodily), and motivational/arousal functions to accomplish.
- Anxiety’s role has broadened beyond responding to danger to accommodate modern life and adapt to society’s demands — legally, ethically, and morally. However, being a respected member of family and community life, performing well at school and work, having healthy relationships with friends and colleagues can be goals on a collision course — working against self-interest or conflicting with one’s values.
- We’ve developed different ways of regulating our emotions and coping with the demands of living, and this affects how vulnerable we are to developing mental disorders.
It’s not in our immediate control to forestall anxiety or any other types of mental disorders. We’re wired. We have genes and neurological imbalances. Our lives can be disordered by anxiety in so many ways. We can get better, but not without a lot of committed effort alongside the guidance we receive from professionals and possibly the medications to smooth the bumpy road. It’s not our character, our flaws, or our being sad, pathetic creatures.
Coming Up Next
Anxiety is a baseline psychological condition, like prime numbers in math or ground zero in a building project. It’s foundational for other disorders at the same time. Anxiety and panic disorder. Anxiety and depression. GAD, SAD, and OCD. Symptoms often begin during childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood. Girls and women are more likely to experience anxiety disorders than boys and men. In the next posts, I’ll cover these anxiety disorders: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD),social anxiety disorder (SAD), panic disorder, specific phobias, and agoraphobia:
In Post 7: When Anxiety Drifts to Disorder, I’ll talk more about anxiety in general and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in specific, along with some profiles in courage.
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