52 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
interacting with a person of authority, anxiety may func-
tion as a way to detect threat related to fear of negative
evaluation.
Practice Using an example from your own life, try to identif y
the function of your anxiety, keeping in mind that anxiety occurs
in multiple situations and contexts. What was the threat that you
were trying to detect?
Sometimes anxiety occurs even when it’s not warranted.
For example, sometimes you might feel as if you’ve encoun-
tered a bear or as if there’s a burglar in your house, but in
actuality, there’s no bear or burglar or even any apparent
reason for your anxious feelings. One key explanation for
how this occurs is the way anxious individuals pay attention
to their environment.
Imagine that when you were a young child, a neighbor’s
aggressive dog bit you. Ever since then, you have gone out of
your way to avoid dogs, and you are often watchful and on
guard for the presence of dogs. Perhaps you startle easily
when you hear a dog bark on TV, or you are excessively vigi-
lant while walking around your neighborhood in case a dog
is running free. To a degree, this is a smart way to guard
against harm from dogs, yet because you are prone to view
dogs as threats, you tend to pay more attention to anything
that might indicate their presence (at the expense of enjoy-
ing your walk or other pleasurable activities that you might
avoid because of your fear of dogs). This includes not only
stimuli related to dogs (such as a “Beware of Dog” sign and
the telltale jingle of the tags on a dog’s collar) but also unre-
lated or misperceived stimuli, such as when you mistake a
cat or a ball for a small dog or you avoid walking by a certain