The Vicious Cycle

This diagram from www.anxietyuk.org perfectly describes the process of anxiety for a person who is unable to comprehend it, or it can help a person who actually has anxiety understand what it happening to them, from my personal experience. It's a little hard to read here, but it basically shows a cycle (which helps show that anxiety is a vicious circle as well), with "feelings," "thoughts," and "fear" as the three main categories. "Feelings" include the physical effects your body may feel such as a rapid heart beat and feeling shaky or sweaty. "Thoughts" includes the irrational feelings that anxiety causes you to feel, such as "I might die," or, from "The Pizza Boy" example, "there is someone at my door trying to hurt me." Finally, these thoughts and feelings lead to the fear that something is seriously wrong. Below is the explanation provided by www.anxietyuk.org.

The ‘fear of the fear’ often makes us feel worse as we are literally on edge waiting for bad feelings to happen; we stop doing things that we link with the negative (bad) feelings or thoughts. This is called avoidance. The more that we avoid the thing that we link with feeling bad, the more we think of it as being dangerous.

This means that the next time we have to face the situation or event, our body tells us that it is dangerous and the fight, flight or freeze response kicks in. We feel that we either need to run away from the ‘dangerous’ thing, fight it or we feel that our body is frozen to the spot.

Either way, our body is not happy when we feel all of these horrible feelings and think horrible things. By understanding why we feel this way, we can then take away the ‘scared’ feeling because we know that it is just our body reacting to something that it thinks is scary, even though it is actually harmless. No-one ever died from having anxiety!