Eli5: Is anxiety or stress beneficial in any way?
In: 6
People misunderstand anxiety. Lots of people seem to think that anxiety only exists as the result of a disorder.
That’s not the case. Everyone experiences anxiety.
Think of it like pain. Pain is unpleasant, but it serves an important purpose. It’s an alarm system that tells you when you’re doing damage to yourself. It’s good that you feel pain when you put your hand on a stove because that’s your brain telling you to take your hand off. If you didn’t feel pain, you wouldn’t take your hand off until you’d already done severe damage to yourself.
Anxiety is another alarm system, but for things that haven’t happened yet.
Imagine your prehistoric ancestors. One caveman hears something rustling in the bushes, worries it might be a tiger, and decides to move somewhere safer. Another hears the sound but doesn’t worry about it, and gets eaten by a tiger.
Even in modern situations, it helps us. It’s good that a student feels anxious before an exam. In a healthy person, that anxiety pushes them to prepare for the exam. A person who didn’t feel anxious at all would be more likely to not prepare and fail the exam.
It’s good that you feel anxious about public speaking, because that’s your brain warning you to be careful about what you say because if you say something stupid it could have real consequences.
An anxiety disorder is like a broken alarm. You don’t want a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast, just like you don’t want to feel unbearably anxious every time you talk to a stranger. But you also don’t want a smoke alarm that doesn’t go off even when the whole room is on fire. And you don’t want to never experience anxiety.
There’s a recorded case of a woman who had a rare brain injury that causes her not to experience fear or anxiety. She doesn’t worry about anything. And that’s why she’s been mugged, almost murdered, and in abusive relationships. She doesn’t get the warning signals that most people get that tell them to avoid them.
That feeling you get when walking alone on a dark street at night, which makes you decide to take the bus home instead? That’s anxiety. It’s helping you.
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