Anxiety can take many forms, from panic attacks to intense worries to inability to interact with others as the fear of being rejected or humiliated looms large.  The experience of anxiety can be overwhelming.

Symptoms of panic include racing heart, difficulties with breathing, nausea, dizziness and a profoundly convincing sense that something awful is about to happen.  Worry, a common feature across anxiety disorders, keeps the mind looping in search for solutions for problems that might not even happen.  Socially anxiety creates a sense of watching oneself from the outside and an internal voice that constantly points out all real or imaginary transgressions.

Anxiety might be caused by adverse life events, increased life demands or nothing in particular, as something just happens and our attention centers on the feelings of discomfort.  When anxious, we feel terrified in absence of actual danger.  Anxiety feeds on our very efforts to push it away.  Fortunately, irrespective of the initial cause or its current form, anxiety can be understood as a product of interaction between our attention (number 1 in the Cycle of Anxiety diagram), beliefs (2), physical sensations (3), behaviours (4) and triggers (5).  Older diagrams usually began with a trigger, however research has shown that how we pay attention and what we pay attention to is more important than triggers.  We react to our perceptions.