The Benefits of Anxiety
by: Kendall McCarthy, LPC, CSAC Anxiety can be a horrible feeling that most want to avoid at all costs. Biologically, there is researching showing that anxiety can be related to dips in serotonin levels, predisposing us to hypervigilence and awareness of stress. Nonetheless, to the individual feeling these symptoms, it can seem all encompassing and overwhelming. As a trauma therapist, I want to change the narrative on anxiety. Think about amazingly protective anxiety is. When bad things happen in our life that are out of our control, our anxiety is our gut instinct talking. It’s the thing that keeps us safe when there is real danger. This is a biological thing, driven from the part of the brain we share with prehistoric man when the dangers of the world were literally life or death. The cavemen that were not anxious were lunch, and the others ran off and survived to be our predecessors. In this way, the anxious tendency was literally passed to us from our predecessors. Non