We all need anxiety. It keeps us safe. But when anxiety turns into an anxiety disorder, it can be debilitating in more ways than one. It may negatively impact your health, work-life, relationships, and sense of self-worth.

With so much affected by an anxiety disorder, it’s common to question whether the condition has long-term influences, particularly on your brain.

Below, we’ll look at what anxiety is, how it influences your brain, and what you can do about it.

What Is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a normal reaction to stressful situations. It’s integral to our safety, as it helps detect danger in our surroundings. Effectively, it’s your body’s fire alarm - it lets you know when there’s a threat, so you can either fight back, flee the situation, or freeze and hope the threat dissipates.

This level of anxiety is manageable and, in fact, highly beneficial. However, nowadays, the threats to our safety tend to be pretty limited. Instead, our threats are often psychological - they’re predictions of potential future threats. These are called perceived (or imagined) threats.

The thing about perceived threats is that your body could be in a highly stressful state while you’re in complete safety. And it’s all because you’re imagining the danger that could happen rather than responding to a threat that is happening.

Anxiety is considered an anxiety disorder when feelings of worry and unease are pervasive and intense; these affect roughly 20% of the population. Anxiety disorders have a physical impact, elevating your heart rate and blood pressure and increasing the risk of developing heart disease.

They can also trigger insomnia and cause difficulties in your professional life and relationships. But the question is: can it change you psychologically? Before we look into this, let’s discuss what “brain rewiring” actually means.

What is Brain Rewiring?

Brain rewiring, also called neuroplasticity, is the brain’s ability to adapt itself based on how we live our lives. Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, aptly described brain rewiring:

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

• Donald Hebb

Here, Hebb describes how neural pathways are formed in the brain and reinforced through repetition.

Neurons are the information messengers in your brain; they use electrical and chemical signals to transfer information between the brain regions and out to the nervous system.

When you see a threatening stimulus, specific neurons will fire. Then, other neurons will fire based on your response. If you stay safe after your response, your brain will assume it’s because of your action, so the neural pathway between the stimulus and your response will be strengthened.

When you have repeatedly been exposed to this threat and responded with the same action, the neural pathway will be so strong that your response will almost be automatic.

The brain does this to learn, grow, and heal based on the environments you’re typically exposed to. The way your brain is wired can significantly impact your success at performing everyday and more challenging tasks. Therefore, if an anxiety disorder causes brain rewiring, it’s worth knowing.