Part 3: Fear, Worry, Anxiety and Stress—Untangling the Distress Web

This spooky web can be sticky to get out of!

I have been sharing my exploration into fear - its webs and loops, and generally speaking, its power to throw our emotions into dysregulation and our body systems out of the homeostasis for which we were made. My first two posts on the topic can be found here, if you would like to read them.

I used the personal story of our family handling the acute crisis of my husband resigning suddenly, to introduce the idea of fear loops as well as describe what goes on in our nervous systems in response to an acute threat. Then we covered the concept of homeostasis: a point of stability or balance that our nervous systems are designed to find and sustain or return to. I shared the steps the nervous system (parasympathetic, specifically), goes through to calm us down, and a few tools to help restore equilibrium.

Let’s do a deeper dive now, into fear loops - and specifically, fear feedback loops- that can become like a sticky web that ensnares both our thoughts and bodies.

How Can a Negative Feedback Loop Be Positive?

I have mentioned feedback loops, but have not yet defined the term. Early in my fear research, I sought out a clear and applicable definition, and actually found it outside the field of neurobiology. A highly regarded source that articulates the concept of  feedback loops, including both the positive and negative types, in the context of systems and biology is the landmark book: Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World  by MIT Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System Dynamics Group, John D. Sterman. According to Sterman:

 A feedback loop is a system where the output of a process is fed back into the system as input, either to regulate (stabilize or maintain balance) or to amplify the effects of the process.

As examples, feedback loops are common in biology, such as when describing body temperature regulation, and in psychology, when explaining how anxiety can feed more anxious thoughts.

There are two types of feedback loops, negative and positive. But the use of the words, negative and positive, can be misleading here. A negative feedback loop does not mean it is necessarily unhealthy or undesirable. Labeling it negative refers to the effect (or output) of counteracting the original input. Such is true in the example of stabilizing body temperature: In thermoregulation, the negative loop works to reverse the change and maintain homeostasis by keeping body temperature within a narrow, healthy range.

Whereas a positive feedback loop refers to the output of amplifying or increasing the original input, but it does not always mean the result is healthy or desirable. Referring to the psychology example, where anxiety feeds more anxious (unhealthy) thoughts, using the term positive feedback loop describes the amplification of the original input.  

A simple way I have found to remember the difference is this:

A negative feedback loop is self-correcting or counteracting, while a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing or amplifying.

Applying these definitions to my own system’s response to our family’s difficulty, I realized I had been pulled into a positive feedback loop upon hearing my husband’s news (I quit my job!):

My unregulated distress response was producing anxious and catastrophic thinking, that then led to more anxiety. I needed to get in touch with the elements of this destructive and unsustainable loop to steady my system so I could support my children’s and husband’s internal response systems returning to stable.

Distinguishing the Elements of the Loop

In this discussion of feedback loops, fear, worry and anxiety each play a role in creating and sustaining a disruptive fear cycle. And all three emotions produce a stress response.

In our everyday lives, we tend to use the emotion words, fear, worry, anxiety and stress, interchangeably when describing someone’s emotional state; but are they synonyms? In fact, although related, these distress responses are distinct in origin and expression.

Consider how each emotion contributes to the creation of this fear loop: Initial fear is an immediate stress response to a possible threat, whereas worry creates a more prolonged stress response in which the threat does not have to be immediate, just possible. If the worry continues it becomes chronic, keeping the body in a state of stress, even without an active threat. Over time this can produce the state of anxiety that can result in burnout and/or health problems.

This creates a feedback loop:

The resulting anxiety, from the unregulated fear and worry, heightens the perception of threat - even benign or imagined ones – then more fear is triggered...and the stress response is continually activated.

Here is a chart that summarizes these feedback loop components, their roles and natures:

The bottom line is fear triggers acute stress. Repeated negative thinking prolongs activation, manifesting in worry and anxiety. Over time, this leads to chronic stress, which throws off our neural circuits and hormonal systems, making us more reactive to fear and less able to regulate worry and facilitate homeostasis in our total brain-body system.

Reflecting on my family experience now, I can identify moments when I was caught in each of those phases of a fear feedback loop. Thankfully, necessity propelled me learn more about how to recognize when the fear switch is being tripped and gain the awareness and tools needed to disrupt the formation of the unhealthy loop.

Now that we can see how fear, worry, and anxiety - all producing a stress response - create unhealthy and unhelpful loops, we can turn our attention to:

How can we change the way we relate to these inevitable distress emotions? The key? How you handle your thoughts.

In my next post, I will share a valuable resource that was a gamechanger in my quest to transform how I relate to the thoughts that are a part of these distress loops. Stay tuned...

Meanwhile, to ponder...

Which distress emotion -fear, worry, anxiety (all of which produce stress responses)- shows up most often in your story, and how does it keep you stuck in a loop?

To consider...

Journaling Prompt: Identify a recent situation where you experienced fear, worry, stress, or anxiety. Which one was at the root, and how did it spiral into the others?

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