Increasingly, in my work with children and in current literature, clinical levels of anxiety has become a common problem and diagnosis. Does this observational data reflect something actually having changed in our children? Or, perhaps it’s a function of society and therapists simply changing the way anxiety is seen?

Regardless, I certainly work with many children who struggle with anxiety, to the extent that it impacts their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral health. I teach many techniques for better managing anxiety; but, I found that I lacked insight on the functional purpose of anxiety and how anxiety is different from other feelings.

Should it even be conceptualized as a feeling? I’ve been certified in one approach to crisis management that defines anxiety as a behavior. That doesn’t seem correct to me, but it underscores the difficulty professionals have in how to even frame the concept. Anxiety seems to have a lot in common with other feelings; but in some ways, it seems more like a mood in how it persists in the background of a person’s brain functioning.

I teach that the brain is composed of many specialized parts. These parts need to work together. That means there needs to be a communications network between these different parts.

Here’s the problem:

Only some of the brain parts communicate in English (or any other spoken language). Only some parts of the brain understand what we commonly think of as “language.” So how do the other parts of the brain communicate?

One form of communication is feelings. Something “feels” a certain way, and that cues you to focus on a part of the body or part of your environment. Some parts of the brain communicate more with images, some with dreams, and some with intuition.

From this perspective, anxiety is a mechanism of communication within one’s own brain!

Emotions grow more complex and nuanced as one gets older. Anxiety seems like a very early emotion, present even in newborns. Therefore, it must be a very basic form of internal communication. It seems to me that what it is communicating is the message “something is wrong.”

In the Bear Clan Meta-Compass perspective, using the Archetype Compass, we are all born Artists. As newborns, we have relatively few behaviors (The Warrior can’t even turn over yet) and relatively few thoughts (The Scout seems to mostly be interested in exploring ways to get basic needs met). The closest we have to executive skills (The Chief) are regulatory mechanisms in the brain that keep our heart beating, our lungs processing oxygen, and all the other tasks grouped into the autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system is, I believe, the origin for The Chief, and for executive skills that will develop over a person’s lifetime. Let’s imagine that the part of that newborn’s brain that monitors oxygen levels in the blood detects insufficient oxygen. How does that part of the brain communicate this situation to the parts of the brain that can take action to address that problem? To further complicate the situation, there are multiple parts of the brain that could resolve the issue. Is this simply a time to take a relatively deep breath, a time to burst into tears and screams, or a time to change body position?

The oxygen-sensing part of the brain needs to communicate with multiple other parts of the brain. Perhaps it sends an electrical / biochemical signal that triggers anxiety (or perhaps on a molecular level is anxiety). Something is wrong. Other parts of the brain focus on that “wrong feeling” and a particular corrective action is initiated.

In this conceptualization, anxiety starts out as a communications vehicle of the brain’s regulatory mechanisms. Thus anxiety is a necessary phenomenon that focuses parts of the brain on some dysregulation. So why does it sometimes go so wrong and what can we do about it?

On the level of the Bear Clan Archetype Compass, the answer is to strengthen The Chief!