Is it anxiety?

Take the normed screening tool that can identify if and what level of anxiety reactions may be a part of your life. Anxiety is the flight of the fight and flight central nervous system response to stressors. Imagine for a moment if you are going for a walk in the evening through your local park and a saber toothed tiger jumps into your path. Your brain in a split second decides to either run or fight. Your brain decides to turn and flee back up the path and you do. Your heart is racing, your thoughts are “RUN!”, muscles tremble from the immediate release of adrenaline and blood to the legs, you sweat and you may even get tunnel vision. These are all adaptive and effective responses to an actual physical threat because our brain wants to keep us alive.

However, what if it isn’t an actual physical threat? Instead let’s say that you went to the park to calm down after a stressful day. And instead of calming down, you are ruminating on your boss’s corrective action plan that you got earlier in the day and suddenly you have the same things happen? That is the engagement of the flight system as though you are having an actual physical threat. We have one system to deal with threats and though most of our threats are from psychological stressors, the body still has only one way to deal with the threat – either flee or fight.

Take the inventory now to understand your own level of reactivity of your central nervous system or what we can anxiety.