Anxiety is one of the most common problems we encounter in our clinical practice. The Latin roots of anxiety include concepts related to pain and distress. DiTomasso and Gosch defined anxiety as “apprehensiveness about the potential appearance of future aversive or harmful events.” This apprehensiveness can manifest as numerous symptoms, which, according to the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) include dizziness, nervousness, breathing difficulty, fright, and the inability to relax.

Aaron Beck, a pioneer in anxiety research, described the anxious person as engaging in “catastrophic interpretations of ambiguous stimuli.” In Beck’s approach, anxiety arises from information processing mistakes or biases that come to acquire an emotional underpinning. For example, an anxious person misjudges the extent or nature of a stimulus, and this misjudgment coalesces into, or otherwise reinforces, beliefs about yourself.

Say you’re anxious about asking someone on a date. Naturally, you don’t want to be rejected, but the whole root of your anxiety is the exaggeration of what it might feel like to be rejected. This exaggeration can be based on how you’ve engaged in meaning-making around past experiences. Maybe you’ve had past rejections that cemented a belief that you’re worthless, and the prospect of any future rejection is now more scary because of how it reflects on your value as a person. Maybe you weren’t loved by your parents, and now any rejection—however casual in itself—goes right to the heart of that primal trauma. Whatever the case, anxiety is an apprehensiveness that is larger than an actual circumstance merits.

Therapy aids anxiety by (a) differentiating anxiety from other, related disorders (such as depression); and (b) applying different models to anxiety resolution. Beck applied cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), whose premise is that, because anxiety arises from mistaken thoughts, therapists can assist their clients to perceive and change these thoughts. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) can take a trauma-focused, self-healing, memory-oriented approach to anxiety. For example, an EMDR approach could begin by asking you to picture a past episode of rejection, explore feelings and thoughts related to that episode, and adaptively integrate that memory into a better conception of yourself.

Anxiety is catastrophizing—that is, it’s the set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that go into making the future needlessly painful, distressing, and frightening. Unfortunately, the sense of fear that’s adaptive and useful to us in terms of everyday survival can get hijacked and repurposed into anxiety. A good therapist should be able to help you understand and peel away the many layers of anxiety, restoring your ability to accurately assess how bad things really are.