182 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
anxiety is associated with overly cautious thoughts about
the presence of danger and avoidance behaviors. Imagine
you are walking across the street and you hear what sounds
like a speeding car. A natural reaction would be for you to
anticipate danger and experience fear. This strong emotion
tells you to get out of harm’s way. If there really were a car,
then your anxiety would be adaptive in encouraging you to
avoid the car. This avoidance of something potentially dan-
gerous leads to a form of learning called negative reinforce-
ment (see chapter 3). According to the principles of negative
reinforcement, the sense of safety you experience after
avoiding something that may have been dangerous makes
you more convinced that it was in fact dangerous. This
works well for real threats and is incredibly adaptive;
however, this process can go awry pretty quickly if you are
not careful.
Imagine what would happen if you were crossing the
street and heard what sounded like a speeding car, but this
time it was just the sound of a loud television. W hat would
you feel? Relief! Glad to know that you were no longer in the
presence of impending doom, you would likely turn off your
internal alarm clock, and your anxiety would diminish over
time. It wouldn’t be all that beneficial for your anxiety to
continue, as there was no real threat to which you needed to
respond. But this is exactly what happens in people with
high anxiety: their fear persists despite there being little evi-
dence of threat. In other words, even though the speeding
car isn’t really there, your mind acts as if it were.
You will still learn about the situation irrespective of
whether a threat exists. If you encounter an anxiety-
provoking situation and run the other way, you are teaching
yourself that the situation is dangerous. Your brain will