Anxiety Disorders Are Treatable

Are some people destined to suffer anxiety as adults? That’s one of the questions explored in an interesting article in the October 4 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The story focuses on the work of Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist who has studied how children adapt to new situations. In his work, he found that some babies had a particularly negative reaction to unfamiliar stimuli. These babies, it turned out, were more likely to develop into anxious or fearful children. As they reached adolescence and adulthood, their anxiety dropped somewhat and they functioned seemingly well -- making friends, for example, and getting good grades. But more so than other children, they reported a lot of anxiety and nerves.

These subjects are among the people that Kagan and other researchers have identified as responding intensely to new stimuli and stressful situations. They’re known as “high reactives.” Physically, this is reflected in MRI scans of their brains, as well as through a higher heart rate and faster breathing.

But being anxious by temperament does not always correlate how people function in the world. Someone who starts out as a “high reactive” may grow up in a family that helps him or her manage anxiety constructively. Someone else of similar temperament, however, may have experiences that reinforce a predisposition toward anxiety and may end up with an anxiety disorder.

In addition, being anxious by temperament may not always be such a bad thing. Too much anxiety can paralyze you, but having some anxiety can be helpful. It can motivate us to accomplish something that we need to do. It can help us to consider the consequences of a particular course of action that we think of taking.

The message of the Times article is that anxiety is complex, and not necessarily the life sentence that some people think it is. Sometimes people who start therapy will describe themselves as having a “chemical imbalance.” That’s often shorthand for believing that they are born with whatever symptom they are describing and that their temperament has nothing to do with the way they grew up or have learned to cope with their emotions. It’s also shorthand for believing that there is nothing that they can do about their problem other than take medication. But I am more hopeful about the possibility of change. There is a lot we can do to understand ourselves and the way we think, and to modify those ways of thinking so that they are not so debilitating.