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Anxiety is fear triggered by imagined or future threats, not immediate danger.

The amygdala acts like a smoke alarm—protective, but prone to false alarms.

The prefrontal cortex enables “what if” thinking that can amplify anxiety.

Like how we evolved to have a stress response, we also evolved to have a more immediate response when our lives were threatened. This response is the emotional response we call fear. Due to the relative complexity of emotions, fear didn’t evolve until the brains of our reptilian ancestors developed.

Reptiles share with us, and most of the animal kingdom, a part of the brain known as the amygdala. The amygdala responds to immediate danger in the environment and mounts defences within the body to maximize our chance of survival. Throughout evolutionary history, reptiles who didn’t respond to threats in these ways were more likely to die and the ones that did had a better chance of surviving and reproducing. This tendency for more fear-prone animals to survive and reproduce led evolution to preference these animals, leading to the highly fear-prone humans we are today.

While the brain has........

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