Anxiety, from brain chemistry to inner experience
What happens in the body when anxiety appears, what you can do for your body starting today, and why unease often has deeper roots.
Today anxiety is talked about more and more in terms of chemistry: low serotonin, dopamine, “imbalance”. These explanations contain some truth. Anxiety also happens in the body, and caring for the body matters. But they tell only part of the story. This text tries to put both in their place: what we know about the brain and what remains to be understood.
What happens in the body
When we perceive a danger, real or imagined, the nervous system prepares the body to react. The heart speeds up, breathing becomes shallow, the muscles tense, digestion slows down, attention narrows. This reaction has helped us survive. In anxiety, it is triggered too often, too intensely or without any visible danger, and it does not easily die down.
The neurotransmitters involved
Neurotransmitters are the substances through which neurons communicate with one another. Several of them play an important role in how we experience unease:
- GABA “puts the brakes” on the nervous system. It slows down neural activity and helps the body relax. Many anti-anxiety medications act on it, and so does alcohol.
- Noradrenaline sustains vigilance and “ignites” the alarm reaction: a racing heart, tension, a state of alert.
- Serotonin helps regulate mood, sleep, appetite and impulsivity.
- Dopamine is linked to motivation, curiosity and the pleasure of anticipation. Its absence is felt as a lack of drive.
- Endorphins ease pain and bring a sense of well-being, for example after physical effort or a good laugh.
More than a “chemical imbalance”
The idea that anxiety or depression is simply caused by the lack of a substance, serotonin for instance, has been widely popularised. Research (Moncrieff et al., 2022) does not support it in this simple form. The picture we have today is more complex.
Brain chemistry influences the way we live, and what we live through changes it in turn. Relationships, losses, long-term stress and childhood experiences leave traces in the way the brain responds to danger. Eric Kandel, neurologist, psychiatrist and Nobel laureate, showed that learning and experience change the connections between neurons. The influence therefore runs both ways. This is also why a therapeutic relationship can change, over time, not only what we think but also the way the body reacts.
When anxiety is intense, treatment prescribed by a psychiatrist can be real support. Medication and psychological work do not exclude each other; they often complement each other. Medication can reduce the intensity of the symptoms enough for it to become possible to think about them.
What you can do for your body
A few simple habits support the balance of the nervous system:
- Regular exercise. Consistent physical activity is one of the best-documented ways of reducing anxiety. Brisk walking, swimming, dancing or light jogging are enough. Regularity matters more than intensity.
- Sleep. Regular times for going to bed and getting up stabilise mood. Lack of sleep amplifies alarm reactions.
- Natural light, especially in the morning. It regulates the day–night rhythm and supports serotonin production.
- Slow breathing. A long exhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that calms the body. Yoga and meditation work in the same direction.
- A varied diet. Proteins from meat, fish, eggs and pulses provide tryptophan and tyrosine, the amino acids from which serotonin and dopamine are made. Vegetables, fruit and fermented foods matter too.
- Less caffeine and less alcohol. Too much coffee can cause palpitations and restlessness that are hard to tell apart from anxiety. Alcohol calms you in the moment, but anxiety often comes back stronger the next day.
- Pleasure and closeness. Music, laughter, nature and time spent with people you love are not a luxury but a form of regulation.
Take any supplement only after talking to your doctor.
When self-care is not enough
Perhaps you sleep, move and breathe well, and the unease remains. This does not mean you have done something wrong. It often means that the unease comes from somewhere else.
Freud started out as a neurologist. Early in his career he believed that anxiety was tension accumulated in the body that could not find release. Towards the end of his life he even wrote that one day we might be able to influence mental life directly through chemical substances. And yet his most lasting observation went in another direction. In 1926 he described anxiety as a signal: a warning the psyche gives itself when something from within threatens to come to the surface.
That “something” may be a desire we do not allow ourselves, an anger we cannot express, a loss we have not mourned, or an old fear from childhood awakened by a present situation. Anxiety often appears precisely where these feelings do not yet have a name. That is why calming techniques, however useful, do not always reach the source. They quiet the alarm, but they do not tell us why it is ringing.
What really changes anxiety
Deep change rarely comes from fighting the symptom. It comes from understanding it. Unease loses its force when it finds its words and its story. Many anxieties settle when an old loss can finally be mourned. And feelings that are hard to bear gradually become feelings that can be felt and thought about. All this happens best in a relationship: in the presence of someone who listens attentively, without haste and without judgement.
Caring for the body and searching for meaning are not opposite paths. A body that is rested and active bears the journey inward more easily. And what we come to understand about ourselves shows, over time, in the way we breathe, sleep and live.
If unease is taking up more and more of your life, you can find out more about counselling for anxiety or write to me directly. Psychological counselling does not replace a medical or psychiatric consultation.
If you would like to talk
Write me a few lines about what brings you. There is no need to explain everything.
Or write to me directly at radutudorache@protonmail.com.