Anxiety Explained: Common Triggers, Root Causes, and Steps to Healing
Introduction and Summary
Anxiety is one of the most common emotional experiences—and one of the most misunderstood. Many people confuse anxiety with fear, assuming they’re the same thing, but knowing the difference can make a profound impact on how we respond to each. In this blog post, as part of my series on Anxiety Explained, I’ll explore what anxiety really is, how it differs from healthy fear, and why learning to face it with awareness and self-compassion is the key to lasting change.
We’ll look at common triggers, the deeper roots of anxiety, and the hidden costs of leaving it unaddressed. You’ll learn the difference between coping and healing, and when medication or therapy might be helpful. I’ll also cover how mindset shifts and gentle exposure to anxiety can reduce its grip. Finally, I’ll introduce psychological models—including IFS, EMDR, and CBT—that offer powerful frameworks for understanding anxiety and transforming anxious patterns.
Understanding the Difference Between Fear and Anxiety
Fear is a natural and adaptive emotion that signals potential threats—whether physical or emotional—and prompts us to respond appropriately. It is a necessary part of the human experience that helps protect us from danger. However, when fear becomes disproportionate to the actual threat or persists without a clear cause, it shifts into the realm of anxiety.
While fear serves a protective function, anxiety often disrupts daily functioning and prevents individuals from leading a full and meaningful life. Understanding anxiety means learning to distinguish between these two very different signals in the nervous system.
What Is Anxiety?
The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as an emotion characterized by tension, worried thoughts, and physiological changes such as increased blood pressure. Merriam-Webster describes it as a state of apprehensive uneasiness, typically in response to an anticipated threat or negative outcome.
In practical terms, anxiety is the persistent sense that something might go wrong. This perception triggers the body’s alert system, heightening mental and physical responses in an attempt to prevent harm. Two hallmark indicators of anxiety include:
Racing thoughts – A flood of rapid thinking, often focused on hypothetical problems or worst-case scenarios.
Physical tension – Bodily symptoms such as muscle tightness, elevated heart rate, stomach discomfort, or restlessness.
Triggers and Contributing Factors
Short-term spikes in anxiety can stem from a variety of sources, including:
Stress, fatigue, or poor sleep
Hormonal changes (e.g., menstrual cycles)
Nutritional deficiencies, dehydration, or irregular eating patterns
Excessive caffeine, alcohol, or substance use
Medication side effects or underlying medical conditions
Underlying emotional states such as loneliness or guilt
Many people experience heightened anxiety in the morning, which may decline throughout the day before rising again at night. While these triggers listed here tend to be the most common, there are many other possible triggers not mentioned here. Triggers vary widely among individuals and can be deeply personal.
Root Causes of Anxiety
Anxiety often has its roots in a complex interplay of genetic, psychological, environmental, and developmental factors. If anxiety runs in your family, you are more susceptible to experiencing it yourself. And if you experienced certain conditions in your youth such as childhood trauma, social isolation, or situational stressors such as a major life change or loss, you also more susceptible to experiencing anxiety as an adult.
The Cost of Untreated Anxiety
Without intervention, anxiety can negatively affect work performance, relationships, and overall well-being. Over time, chronic anxiety can become more insidious and lead to more nuanced manifestations such as perfectionism, irritability, sleep disruption, unexplained medical problems, panic attacks, and reliance on unhealthy coping mechanisms such as substance use. Early treatment can interrupt this progression and pave the way for emotional stability and improved quality of life.
Looking for support? Learn more about how I can help via therapy: Anxiety Therapy in Berkeley and throughout California.
Coping vs. Healing
Coping strategies offer short-term relief from anxiety but do not resolve its underlying causes. Healing anxiety involves addressing root contributors—often with therapeutic support—to reduce or eliminate the need for coping over time.
Coping strategies generally fall into two categories:
Healthy distractions – Activities that shift attention away from anxiety, such as exercise, hobbies, or taking a walk.
Calming techniques – Practices like deep breathing, meditation, journaling, or speaking with a trusted friend, which help soothe the nervous system directly.
Future blog posts will explore these strategies in greater depth to help you discover what works best for your needs and support your journey of overcoming anxiety.
When Medication May Be Appropriate
For some individuals, anxiety may severely interfere with daily life and functioning. In such cases, medication prescribed by a psychiatrist or primary care physician can reduce symptoms and support day-to-day functioning. Medication is often most effective when combined with therapy.
How Therapy Helps
Therapy provides both insight and practical tools to manage anxiety. A skilled therapist for anxiety can support clients in:
Understanding their anxiety – Gaining clarity on how anxiety operates in the mind and body.
Identifying triggers – Recognizing patterns in thoughts, behaviors, or physical sensations that provoke anxiety.
Improving self-compassion – Creating a safe space to explore internal experiences without judgment. And as a result, helping you develop increased self-compassion for your experience with anxiety.
Engaging in exposure therapy – A research-backed method that involves gradually facing anxiety-provoking situations to reduce avoidance and build resilience.
Whether through in-person or online anxiety therapy, working with a professional can offer tailored strategies for lasting change.
Developing a Mindset That Supports Healing
Anxiety often takes root in the stories we tell ourselves—narratives shaped by faulty thinking patterns and long-held beliefs. One of the most effective ways to manage anxiety is to develop a clearer understanding of what’s happening in our minds and bodies, and to cultivate a mindset that is informed, compassionate, and grounded in reality.
It’s essential to remember that anxiety doesn’t define us. Feeling anxious doesn’t mean something is fundamentally wrong with who we are. For many people, there’s a deeply ingrained belief that we’re supposed to feel calm, confident, and in control at all times—and that if we don’t, something must be broken. But this belief is not only unrealistic; it also fuels anxiety. The truth is that anxiety is part of the human experience, and learning to relate to it differently can significantly reduce its power over us.
A helpful starting point is to learn to distinguish between healthy fear and unhealthy anxiety. Healthy fear is adaptive—it alerts us to actual danger and prepares us to respond. It’s your nervous system doing its job. But unhealthy anxiety tends to exaggerate risks, project catastrophic outcomes, or respond to situations that don’t pose real threats. The tricky part is that both fear and anxiety feel the same in the body—elevated heart rate, muscle tension, racing thoughts—so it takes intentional awareness to tell them apart. This awareness is central to understanding anxiety and building a foundation for healing.
Anxiety often tries to protect us by encouraging avoidance. It tells us, “If you just stay away from this thing that’s making you anxious, you’ll feel better.” And in the short term, that might be true. But over time, avoidance reinforces the idea that anxiety itself is dangerous, which only makes the cycle stronger. The key to managing anxiety isn’t to eliminate the feeling entirely, but to stop treating it as if it signals real danger every time it arises.
When anxiety shows up, try slowing down and asking yourself some grounding questions:
Is this feeling based on a real, immediate threat, or is it a habitual fear response?
Am I reacting to a physical danger, or to a story my mind is telling me?
Is the worst-case scenario I’m imagining likely, or is it part of an anxious loop?
What evidence do I have that something bad will happen—and what evidence do I have that it won’t?
Developing a mindful, curious attitude toward anxiety can help loosen its grip. When we stop seeing anxiety as an enemy to be feared and start seeing it as a signal to explore, we create space for change. Over time, this mindset shift—combined with practice and support—can make a powerful difference in how we experience and respond to anxiety.
Facing Anxiety to Diminish Its Power
One of the most common—and understandable—responses to anxiety is avoidance. When something makes us anxious, our instinct is often to move away from it, distract ourselves, or find ways to prevent the feeling from arising in the first place. In the short term, this strategy can bring relief. But over time, avoidance actually reinforces the anxiety. It teaches our brain that the anxious feeling itself is dangerous, and that the only way to stay safe is to escape or control the situation.
In contrast, facing anxiety gradually and intentionally—what’s often called “exposure”—helps retrain the brain. It sends a new message: This discomfort is unpleasant, but it’s not harmful. By allowing ourselves to stay with the feeling, rather than run from it, we begin to erode its power.
Take social anxiety as an example. If being in groups or initiating conversation brings up nervousness, the avoidance instinct might lead you to decline invitations or keep interactions brief and superficial. But choosing to attend a social gathering, even while feeling anxious, gives your nervous system a chance to learn that nothing bad happens when you stay present with the discomfort. Over time, repeated experiences like this can shift your internal response—what once felt threatening begins to feel manageable, even routine.
The key here is not about diving into the deep end right away, but about taking small, manageable steps. Anxiety tends to diminish when we gently lean into it with curiosity and self-compassion, rather than trying to conquer it with force or suppress it altogether.
Of course, this process can be challenging, especially if the anxiety is longstanding or intense. You don’t have to do it alone. Working with a therapist can offer a safe, supportive structure for gradually facing what’s difficult. A therapist can help you pace the process, identify patterns, and develop tools that make it easier to approach anxiety with clarity, steadiness, and increasing confidence.
Check out my Berkeley Anxiety Therapy webpage to read more about how therapy can help reduce anxiety. I work with folks throughout California.
Psychological Models That Explain Anxiety
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems views anxiety as the activity of protective internal “parts.” In this model, the mind is made up of subpersonalities, each with its own thoughts, feelings, and roles. Anxiety is commonly produced by parts trying to control life circumstances and prevent emotional pain.
These protective parts often work to prevent painful emotions that you experienced in the past and don’t want to experience again - embarrassment, anger, sadness, etc.
Rather than pathologizing these responses, IFS sees them as attempts to protect the system. Healing occurs as individuals learn to live their lives from a steady place of calm and compassionate internal presence—so parts can release their burdens and return to balanced functioning.
If you are in Berkeley or anywhere in California and looking for an IFS therapist for anxiety or trauma, I specialize in this method.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR, developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro, is based on the Adaptive Information Processing model, which posits that the brain is designed to process and resolve emotional experiences. When trauma disrupts this system, distressing memories may remain “stuck,” along with associated thoughts, sensations, and emotions.
Current situations can unconsciously trigger these unprocessed memories, causing the nervous system to react as though the original threat is still present. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (e.g., eye movements, tapping) to activate the brain’s natural healing processes and integrate the memory into a more adaptive framework.
Over time, this reduces the intensity of anxiety and helps individuals respond to current events with greater emotional flexibility.
If you're in Berkeley or anywhere in California and looking for EMDR therapy for anxiety or trauma, I specialize in this evidence-based approach.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is one of the most researched and effective models for treating anxiety. It focuses on the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. According to CBT, anxiety stems from automatic thoughts—rapid, often distorted interpretations of situations that overestimate danger and underestimate coping ability.
For example, a person might think, “If I speak up, I’ll embarrass myself,” which leads to avoidance and reinforces the idea that social interaction is risky. CBT also addresses core beliefs, such as “I’m not safe” or “I’m not good enough,” which shape how people interpret their experiences.
Treatment involves identifying unhelpful thought patterns, challenging them with evidence, and replacing them with more balanced perspectives. It also includes behavioral strategies—like exposure exercises or cognitive restructuring—that reduce avoidance, build self-trust, and reinforce emotional resilience.
CBT is widely available through both in-person and online anxiety therapy, making it an accessible option for many people seeking to heal.
Conclusion
If you're experiencing anxiety, know that healing is possible. Whether through self-awareness, therapeutic support, or a combination of methods, you can learn to navigate anxiety with greater ease and resilience. I hope this article provided some new insight and encouragement for how to manage your anxiety. If you need additional support, feel free to contact me.
Sources
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Mayo Clinic – Anxiety Disorders Overview. https://www.mayoclinic.org
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