Anxiety, a monster that feeds on our adrenaline

Anxiety is a monster that feeds on our adrenaline while adrenaline is a substance that our body releases when it senses that there is some danger in the environment and wants to encourage us to protect ourselves.

She may be awakened by the sight of a lion or a snake, something that is very unlikely in the world we live in today and which, therefore, seems unadaptive to us. However, adrenaline is also released when we suddenly slip going down the stairs or oil splashes in the pan while cooking dinner.

At this moment our adrenaline shoots up and helps us tie ourselves to the railing or move away from the fire in which we are frying an egg. That is to say, our adrenaline gets us going and helps us act on time before a fatal outcome occurs.

But in that same moment in which the adrenaline is released, The anxiety monster wakes up from its slumber when it smells its food. In principle, it is also part of this protection instinct, which is why it helps us hold on to the railing and try to maintain balance before falling down the stairs.

However, even though a slip on the stairs is an everyday situation, the anxiety monster may wake up and no longer be able to go back to sleep. Then he stays inside us, feeding on the adrenaline that we have released while we continue to feel our hearts beating and the fear filling our bodies.

As long as the monster continues to have adrenaline to feed on, we will feel it inside. However, once we are not in that dangerous situation, The monster, knowing that its adrenaline reserves are running out, will hibernate due to lack of food.

It happens that sometimes the anxiety monster scares us so much that we fight to make it leave our body, we shout at it that we don’t love it, that we don’t accept it and that it shouldn’t be inside us.

This psychological battle causes our body to secrete another torrent of adrenaline, only this time there is no real danger that justifies it, but a monster that is delighted to be fed more and more.

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So, Thanks to excess adrenaline, the anxiety monster becomes enormous and tremendously aggressive. Menacingly, it shouts at us that it is going to paralyze our hearts, that it will dry out our throat or that it will devour our brain.

He can’t do this, but he tells us louder and louder because he knows that this way we hear him better and he manages to obtain more emotional nourishment, more adrenaline. Then he permeates our daily lives with an insatiable hunger that he knows that as subjects we will provide him if he makes himself noticed.

Now, if we do not listen to him and accept his screams as normal, we will stop paying attention to him and he will not get adrenaline from our body, so finally the anxiety monster will have no choice but to immerse himself in a peaceful sleep again and lose weight.

The anxiety monster can only scare our body. As we see, he represents a natural way for our body to act in the face of something that our body or our mind understands as immediate danger.

However, when he gets our attention, he becomes decompensated and emboldened, because he understands that we are the ones who demand him and invite him to act and grow in an uncontrolled way.

It is a simple and normal mechanism that we can all understand. Now, whether this monster is already enormous or if in the future it does not want to go back to sleep, we must remember that It is in our power to make it smaller and irrelevant if we choose to accept that its presence It will depend on whether we open ourselves or limit ourselves to experiencing those sensations that are natural.

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Bibliographic source of interest: Understand and manage your anxiety by José Antonio García Noguera and Javier García Ureña