56 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
with anxiety tend to be especially sensitive to their own
physical symptoms of anxiety, such as increased heart rate,
shallow breathing, and profuse sweating. This type of body
sensitivity is known as interoceptive awareness, which is
another type of attentional bias that’s characteristic of
people with anxiety, such as those who have panic disorder
or generalized anxiety disorder. In essence, anxious people,
on average, tend to pay more attention to their bodily sensa-
tions and have a lower threshold for interpreting physical
signs as problematic or even dangerous.
In several psychological studies, individuals with anxiety
disorders were found to have a higher degree of interocep-
tive awareness (Ehlers and Clark 2000; Van der Does et al.
2000; Pineles and Mineka 2005; Wald and Taylor 2005;
W hite et al. 2006). Other studies have shown that many
people with anxiety disorders have higher physiological
reactivity (Friedman and Thayer 1998; Lundh and Sperling
2002; Amrhein et al. 2005), especially in response to
anxiety- producing stimuli. This means that anxiety disor-
ders, such as social anxiety disorder and post- traumatic
stress disorder, tend to be characterized by higher than
normal physiological reactivity, among other symptoms.
This heightened arousal predisposes people to experience
emotions more intensely and to detect potential threats in
their environment (for example, someone with anxiety
might be more likely to pay attention to something that
looks like a scary spider). In fact, heightened interoceptive
awareness can lead to increases in anxiety.
During periods of anxiety, most people are prone to pay
attention to (in addition to their emotions and thoughts)
physical symptoms of anxiety produced by the autonomic