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 feels that there is some danger in the environment and wants to dispose of us to protect ourselves.

She can be awakened by the vision of a lion or a snake, something that is very unlikely in the world we live in today and therefore seems to us not very adaptive. However, adrenaline is also released when we suddenly slip down the stairs or oil spills out of the pan while cooking dinner.

At this moment our adrenaline is triggered and it helps us to tie ourselves to the railing or to get away from the fire in which we are frying an egg. In other words, our adrenaline gets us going and helps us act in time before a fatal outcome occurs.

But in that same instant in which the adrenaline is released, the monster of anxiety awakens from its lethargy by smelling its food. In principle, he is also part of this protective instinct, so he helps us to hold onto the railing and try to keep our balance before falling down the ladder.

However, despite the fact that a slip on the stairs is a daily situation, the monster of anxiety may wake up and no longer be able to fall asleep again. Then it stays inside us feeding on the adrenaline that we have released while we continue to feel our heart beat and the shock in our body.

As long as the monster continues to have adrenaline to feed, we will feel it inside. However, once we are not in that dangerous situation,

This psychological battle causes our body to secrete another rush 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.

Then, thanks to the excess of adrenaline, the anxiety monster becomes enormous and tremendously aggressive. Menacingly, he yells at us that he is going to paralyze our heart, that he will dry out our throat or that he will devour our brain.

, 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 day to day with an insatiable hunger that he knows that as subjects we will provide him if he is noticed.

Now, if we do not listen to him and accept his cries 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 plunge into a placid sleep again and lose weight.

The anxiety monster can only scare our bodies. As we can 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.

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

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