12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

After the shock, perhaps, the pre-agoraphobic woman leaves her house,
and makes her way to the shopping mall. It’s busy and difficult to park. This
makes her even more stressed. The thoughts of vulnerability occupying her
mind since her recent unpleasant experience rise close to the surface. They
trigger anxiety. Her heart rate rises. She begins to breathe shallowly and
quickly. She feels her heart racing and begins to wonder if she is suffering a
heart attack. This thought triggers more anxiety. She breathes even more
shallowly, increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in her blood. Her heart rate
increases again, because of her additional fear. She detects that, and her heart
rate rises again.
Poof! Positive feedback loop. Soon the anxiety transforms into panic,
regulated by a different brain system, designed for the severest of threats,
which can be triggered by too much fear. She is overwhelmed by her
symptoms, and heads for the emergency room, where after an anxious wait
her heart function is checked. There is nothing wrong. But she is not
reassured.
It takes an additional feedback loop to transform even that unpleasant
experience into full-blown agoraphobia. The next time she needs to go to the
mall, the pre-agoraphobic becomes anxious, remembering what happened last
time. But she goes, anyway. On the way, she can feel her heart pounding.
That triggers another cycle of anxiety and concern. To forestall panic, she
avoids the stress of the mall and returns home. But now the anxiety systems
in her brain note that she ran away from the mall, and conclude that the
journey there was truly dangerous. Our anxiety systems are very practical.
They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of
that is, of course, the fact you ran away.
So now the mall is tagged “too dangerous to approach” (or the budding
agoraphobic has labelled herself, “too fragile to approach the mall”). Perhaps
that is not yet taking things far enough to cause her real trouble. There are
other places to shop. But maybe the nearby supermarket is mall-like enough
to trigger a similar response, when she visits it instead, and then retreats.
Now the supermarket occupies the same category. Then it’s the corner store.
Then it’s buses and taxis and subways. Soon it’s everywhere. The
agoraphobic will even eventually become afraid of her house, and would run
away from that if she could. But she can’t. Soon she’s stuck in her home.
Anxiety-induced retreat makes everything retreated from more anxiety-