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Areas › Worry and anxiety › What worry does
It helps to say to yourself, that was the sound, not the thing. The response is not stupid. It was built from a real event and it spread to whatever looked or sounded close enough, which is what learning does. Once you can spot the resemblance, you can let the surge finish and then check what is actually in front of you.
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty (Quran 17:11). Being quick off the mark, ahead of what is actually there, is described as ordinary human wiring rather than a defect.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of brain imaging studies in generalised anxiety disorder asked whether the scans back up the cognitive models clinicians teach, and found the neurobiological base is still thin. So the picture of a learned alarm is a useful teaching story more than a proven mechanism. Its worth is that people can catch themselves with it, not that imaging has confirmed it.
Mochcovitch MD, da Rocha Freire RC, Garcia RF, Nardi AE. (2014). A systematic review of fMRI studies in generalized anxiety disorder: evaluating its neural and cognitive basis.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An alarm learned in one situation will fire at anything similar until new experience teaches it otherwise.
Treat the whole of social media as poison and you will never hear anything true about it again. Some of what happens there is genuinely good for people.
When the alarm takes over, the reasoning part of you goes quiet for a while. That is not you losing your mind. It comes back on its own.
Backing out brings relief within seconds, and that relief is exactly what teaches the fear to come back bigger. The cost is paid later, which is why it is so easy to miss.