The entire design of the body's alarm system is geared toward protecting the individual from threats. But people don't just react to threats—they anticipate them, as well. Again, this kind of fear is part of the normal strategy humans have evolved to avoid danger. Anticipatory fear has two distinct modes: anxiety, a preoccupation with an impending threat, and worry, the internal struggle to find a way to escape the danger.
It is probably safe to say that most of the fear experienced since September 11 has been worry and anxiety. Americans have been anxious about attacks from anthrax-laced mail, they have worried about the availability of antibiotics and the safety of the water supply. Such anticipation is not only normal, it is healthy—often the best way to protect oneself is to spot a threat before it is imminent and find ways to avoid it.
For decades, many people feared the threat of nuclear war. Indeed, after the Soviet Union demonstrated its nuclear weapons in 1949, many Americans were beset by the kinds of worries and anxieties that some people now feel about the possibility of terrorist attacks. In fact, many people were certain that civilization as we know it was about to end—a feeling made stronger by books and movies, such as "On the Beach" and "The Day After" set in postapocalyptic futures.
This worry about nuclear annihilation led to actions such as building bomb shelters and installing the so-called hotline between Moscow and Washington. Indeed, one can argue that taking such steps in response to cold-war hysteria kept nuclear war at bay.
Yet some fears persist in ways that are not advantageous to the fearful. Those sorts of fears create more problems than they solve, and paralyze rather than motivate. Anxiety disorders are a significant mental health problem in the United States—about one in four people experience one form at some point in their lives. Several variants have been identified, from social anxiety disorder, a fear based on social scrutiny, to panic disorder, in which a person is actually afraid of fear itself.
Sometimes, though, a person may develop anxiety or worry about potential catastrophes to an extent far beyond the normal fear response. Even though the individual may not think she is worrying too much, her anxieties, in fact, cause an enormous amount of stress and may even keep her from fully participating in everyday life. This sort of exaggerated worry is known as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Some 4 million American adults have GAD, and it afflicts women twice as often as it does men.
The development of GAD appears to involve a small genetic factor. In July 2001, researchers from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond reported in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders that a study of 3,100 twins suggests that inherited traits account for some 15 to 20 percent of the vulnerability to GAD; the other factors are environmental.
The National Institute of Mental Health describes the symptoms of GAD this way: People with GAD can't seem to shake their concerns, even though they usually realize that their anxiety is more intense than the situation warrants. Their worries are accompanied by physical symptoms, especially trembling, twitching, muscle tension, headaches, irritability, sweating or hot flashes.
The physical symptoms of GAD, then, mirror the body's reaction to fear. Indeed, GAD can be thought of as living in a state of constant, if low-level, fear. But unlike the normal causes of fear—real threats that require a serious response—generalized anxiety disorder exaggerates the amount of danger arising from a potential situation. People with GAD tend to overestimate the likelihood of harm coming from a given situation and view minor or ambiguous events as catastrophes. If normal fear is an alarm, GAD is a false alarm you can't turn off.
Normal worrying differs from excessive worrying in amount, not in kind. A study of 1,588 college students, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology by psychologists at Pennsylvania State University and Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, found that there was no clear way to separate levels of worry into two tidy groups. Instead, there seems to be a continuum of worry.
Research suggests that GAD is linked to the brain's storage of emotionally charged memories. The feelings one has at the time of an event appear to play an important role in the strength of later memories. Although all memories fade over time, the ones connected with the most passionate emotions remain the most indelible.
From the evolutionary perspective, that makes sense: Memories are stored so that we can gain information about the world; so remembering emotional events helps us duplicate our biggest triumphs and avoid repeating our most ignominious defeats. The best way to do that is to retain the memory with a mental tag that conveys an emotional message.
Sometimes, though, emotionally laden memories of a dangerous situation get stored in a confusing way. That's particularly true of threats that may be somewhat abstract in nature. If a snake has threatened you, you know what to look out for in the future. But for Americans who feel threatened by terrorism, the danger signs are not exactly clear. Indeed, in the weeks after September 11, the news was filled with details of the hijackings and reports of anthrax bacteria arriving in the mail. These images, as well as predictions that future attacks are 100 percent certainties, are all "tagged" with fearful emotions.
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