Why we’re flooded with anxiety?

Anxiety is a product of evolution. Yes. It’s there to help us survive. When I get anxious, my sympathetic nervous system activates. The heart rate increases, bumping more blood to the brain. Then, my brain will benefit from the increase of blood flow, as a result I become vigilant and cognitively agile, and thus giving me the eloquence to speak. In other words, I’m optimally aroused in arousal curve model. People need some arousal to attain the their peak performance, even for difficult tasks like public speaking. Neither too relaxed nor too stressed is good, as the arousal-performance model Yerkes-Dodson curve shows.

Arousal Curve, Image From: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/OriginalYerkesDodson.svg

But why does it go wrong? It’s the way we manage anxiety — we want to get rid of it.

Humans are social animals. We fear to say the wrong things. We fear to be judged when we speak. That’s why we get anxious.

And it’s okay. It’s natural.

It is as natural as this. When I see a delightful piece of cake, smell the aroma in the air, my mouth starts salivating. I can’t, nor will I try to control these hard-wired responses: when I’m standing in front of a crowd, I don’t coerce myself to drive anxiety out. Because it’s much like telling my mouth to stay dry when I want to devour the cake. I simply can’t do it.

Supposed I try to get rid of anxiety — and it’s where things get nasty. If I failed to suppress my anxiety, I feel even more anxious for the failure. The more anxious I feel, the more I’m trying to get rid of anxiety … so and so on. And bloom! Do you see a full-fledged vicious cycle here? My arousal level would ascent and ascent far beyond the optimal, without even the slightest hope to relieve. This is when my mind would turn blank, and can’t even utter a word except um, huh or what.