Last time I wrote about the overachiever’s burnout, about what professional exhaustion looks like and feels like, and a few directions for solving it. If you have not read it, I would start there.
But most of the time burnout does not show up alone. It has a quieter brother, one that has usually been with us for longer: functional anxiety.
Anxiety is an activation of the sympathetic nervous system, a mode of constant alert, and over the long term, left unresolved, it usually leads to emotional exhaustion.
Because an anxious person can spend up to 45% of their internal resources every day managing states of anxiety, negative thoughts and inner noise.
But first, let us learn to recognise anxiety and to tell it apart from fear.
Recognising anxiety
The other day I was walking down from the Postăvaru cabin towards Poiana Brașov, in the Romanian Carpathians. We had done a two hour route, the way we like to on weekends, we had eaten at the cabin, and we were heading home, talking about how it had gone.
Suddenly the phone I had forgotten I was even carrying started sounding like an alarm. At the same time, so did hers. And so did the phone of a man walking down alone, about ten metres ahead of us. From behind us, somewhere in the distance, another phone.
Four phones going off at the same time, on a mountain, could only mean one thing. Bears.
With one hand I started taking off my backpack, looking for the bear spray I never leave home without. With the other I pulled out my phone. It was RO-Alert, the national emergency alert system:
Warning, a bear on the Red Trail leading to Postăvaru.
We were on the Red Trail.
My mind, calm and quiet until that second, started to be flooded from every direction with thoughts, scenarios and questions.
Are we definitely on the Red Trail? Yes we are, we passed the sign three minutes ago. Plus I have walked this route before. But does “on the Red Trail” mean it is above us, so we have already passed it, or below us, which means we will absolutely walk straight into it? This spray has not expired, has it? What is the spray range? Five to seven metres I think. There is wind. Which direction is the wind coming from, because spraying bear repellent into my own face is exactly what I need right now.
I felt myself becoming hypervigilant, all at once.
My jaw tightened slightly, my breathing became shallower and shorter, the muscles around my eyes started to contract. And I was perfectly aware of all of it while it was happening.
It was not panic. It was anticipatory tension, rising, as if at any second I might need to fight. I almost smiled when, searching for the spray in my backpack, I found my pocket knife and hesitated for half a second. As if fighting a 500 kilogram wild animal were ever a viable option.
From the outside, most likely, nothing about me looked unusual. Inside, the whole flight crew was shouting in unison: brace for impact.
While I was doing all of this, the man ahead of us, whom we did not know, also stopped, hesitant, looked at us and asked, briefly, as if he already knew the answer: shall we walk down together?
How the amygdala works and what the fight or flight mechanism does
We did not meet the bear that day. But the episode is a very useful scenario for showing the line between normal fear and anxiety.
See, if you meet a bear in the forest, you should be afraid.
No fear, you get closer to a wild animal than you should, you risk dying.
But if your nervous system is working within normal parameters, in those moments an area of the brain called the amygdala activates abruptly, like an alarm going off in a fire station.
The heart starts beating faster. We are in danger. Mobilise resources. And the body automatically starts mobilising them. Physiologically, some important changes take place:
- The nervous system releases adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormones, which prepare the body for action.
- Heart rate and breathing accelerate to pump more oxygen and blood to the large muscles, so you can fight.
- The pupils dilate to widen the visual field, so you can be sure you see the danger, while digestion, immunity and other non essential processes stop temporarily to conserve energy.
- Blood pressure rises and blood is redistributed to the extremities. You want more blood in your arms and legs and less of it around your internal organs.
- Sweating increases to cool the body, and the brain becomes hyperfocused on possible threats.
What I have just described is a fight or flight sequence.
All of these reactions form an automatic survival mechanism, designed to increase your chances of fighting off an attacker or running efficiently from danger.
Then, some minutes later, when the danger has passed and you feel safe again, the alarm switches itself off.
The first key to understanding stress and anxiety is this alarm system: the amygdala, which triggers fight or flight.
Except that this alarm system does not only go off for real things you should be afraid of. Sometimes it also goes off for imagined events and imagined dangers.
Or, as Mark Twain would have put it:
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
What is the difference between fear and anxiety
And here we reach the first important idea about fear and anxiety: when there is a real, imminent danger, fear is justified. It is part of our defence system.
But when we run scenarios about a potentially dangerous future whose chances of happening are very small, it is no longer just fear. That is when we are talking about anxiety.
Anxiety is what we do inside our own heads, running negative scenarios that may never happen.
We had not met the bear yet. But we knew there was a high, imminent probability that we would. There was a bear very close to us. In other words, what I was feeling was justified by the reality of that moment.
We were on a trail, the bear was on the same trail, we knew this from an official source. We were going to keep walking on that trail, so with every additional step it became more likely that we would meet it.
Technically, most of what I felt was fear.
But suppose we had been at home, on an ordinary day, talking about going up the mountain some time.
And suppose that suddenly, apparently out of nothing, my mind had been flooded with the same thoughts and fears and scenarios as before, about potential bears, about the range of bear spray, about the news three days ago of a tourist attacked somewhere on the Transfăgărășan road. And suppose all those thoughts had triggered an emotional state and a physical reaction similar to the one I had when the alert arrived.
Well, the same reactions that were justified on Postăvaru would suddenly, at home, not be justified any more. They would be exaggerated. Why? Because there was no bear in my house, there was no risk of walking to the bathroom and meeting one, I had no fact and no concrete piece of data suggesting I was, now or in the future, in danger of being attacked by a bear.
Everything I felt in that case would have been in my mind, created and fed by my mind. That would be anxiety. An exaggerated, disproportionate reaction to something I imagined could theoretically happen, at some point, maybe.
It would just be our mind, used to running negative scenarios, solving problems that do not exist and most likely never will.
Fear is an immediate reaction to an existing danger that has the potential to harm us.
Anxiety is a negative emotion in the absence of a real existing danger, where the threat is anticipated through imagined scenarios.
Fear is the result of an imminent danger. Anxiety is the result of an imagined threat or danger.
How normal is anxiety, and when does it become a problem?
Most of us feel anxiety at some point in our lives. For some it is bearable. Others have felt it for so long that they are under the impression that this is simply what normal feels like.
“That is just how I am, a bit anxious. I have always been like this,” a change strategy client once told me.
As if it were normal to feel anxiety, to worry, to have negative thoughts flooding your mind every single day of your life.
Well, I am here to tell you it is NOT normal.
Not in the sense that there is something wrong with you, because plenty of people experience degrees of anxiety. In the sense that you should not tolerate it in your life. Because anxiety is a solvable problem. It is normal for it to appear sometimes, it is part of the experience of being human, but most of the time we should be capable of controlling our own thoughts and our own emotions. Of not letting ourselves slide into mental and emotional overdrive.
And of learning the techniques and the skills that let us get ourselves out of there, every time we do happen to slip.
A personal note: if anxiety did not exist, I probably would not be doing the work I do today, helping as many people as I do. It is an emotion I know intimately, even if in recent years the two of us, anxiety and I, have made separate groups of friends and rarely meet outside the one to one sessions I run with my clients.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.