You’re Wired for Anxiety. And You’re Wired to Handle It | Anne Marie Albano | Big Think

You’re Wired for Anxiety. And You’re Wired to Handle It

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Big Think and the Mental Health Channel are proud to launch Big Thinkers on Mental Health, a new series dedicated to open discussion of anxiety, depression, and the many other psychological disorders that affect millions worldwide.

In our first video in the series, Dr. Anne Marie Albano, director of Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, traces the biological and evolutionary origins of anxiety, the unique features of anxiety in the 21st century, and the powerful research and tech-driven treatments that have emerged in recent decades.

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ANNE MARIE ALBANO:

Dr. Albano received her Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Stress and Anxiety Disorders at SUNY Albany. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, a Beck Institute Scholar, and is board certified in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

She is on the board of directors of Anxiety and Depression Association of America, and past president of the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology of the American Psychological Association. She is also past-president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, where she is now publications chair. She is past editor of Cognitive and Behavioral Practice and currently is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

She has published more than 90 articles and chapters and is the co-author of several cognitive behavioral treatment manuals and of the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Children, all published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Albano served as a Principal Investigator of a 6-site, National Institute of Mental Health-sponsored study entitled "Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Treatment Study" and also was a PI for the Treatments for Adolescents with Depression Study. Both trials examined the relative efficacy of CBT, medication, combination treatment, and pill placebo in youth. Her book with Leslie Pepper, Helping Your Anxious Child: Free Your Child from Fears and Worries and Create a Joyful Family Life, was the 2014 Self-Help Book Award winner from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and received a 2014 Seal of Merit from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Anne Marie Albano: So anxiety is rooted in biology. It’s evolutionarily based in that we have our own fight-or-flight responses. Some of it is very old and triggered from the deep part of our brain; that is the oldest part, the fight-or-flight response. And then some of it comes from the cortex, which evolved much later and that’s worry. And that might be 21st century anxiety because there’s a lot we can find to worry about these days. Are we going to make enough money? Are we going to get the right job? Are we going to provide for our families? Are we going to do the right thing? What could go wrong in the world? So many things can trigger anxiety just by walking through everyday life. But the good news is our systems are also set up to handle it. The beauty of anxiety and the system that we have of anxiety that’s all throughout our nervous system is that it evolved to protect us. So there’s two components to it. The oldest being the amygdala, which is deep in the brain in the reptilian part of our brain, signals whether we should fight something, flee something, or freeze. When it goes awry is when it’s perceiving immediate danger that really isn’t there. Somebody’s heart starts to race and they think, "Oh my goodness, is something wrong with me?" That’s panic and that can send somebody into a panic attack which is the clinical manifestation of the fight-or-flight response. The other thing with anxiety is again as we evolved and became thinking human beings and started building communities and cities and civilizations is our brain evolved and there’s the cortex. It’s within the cortex that we think. It’s within that system that we worry. And so we can worry ourselves into states of anxiety where we are fraught in not knowing what to do and we actually get stuck with anxiety and so we’re tense and...

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