What We Can Do To Lower Anxiety Baseline
A heightened baseline means they start from a higher-than-average level of underlying stress or sensitivity to potential threats. Here’s how this works:
Early Stress and Trauma:
When children experience prolonged stress, like family instability, illness, or trauma, this can increase their anxiety baseline. The neural pathways associated with the "fight or flight" response are strengthened.
1. Increased Sensitivity: When the baseline level of anxiety is high, the brain is more sensitive to perceived threats, making it easier for small stressors to trigger strong anxiety responses.
2. Lower Threshold for Triggers: With a higher anxiety baseline, the person may experience an exaggerated response to situations that might not bother others as much. This could be because their system is already on alert, primed for stress.
Frequent Activation of the Amygdala A heightened baseline often indicates that the amygdala (the brain’s “alarm center”) is more active or easily activated, making the body more reactive to stressors and thus more likely to respond intensely to situations.
Lowering this baseline can help reduce the frequency and intensity of anxiety responses, allowing the person to respond to stress more calmly over time.
Children can develop a higher-than-normal anxiety baseline through a combination of environmental, genetic, and psychological factors, often creating a feedback loop that strengthens anxious responses. Here’s how this elevated baseline can form:
We can counteract that cycle by introducing a consistent, behaviour that will strengthen their relaxation response and lowering their anxiety baseline over time.
Genetics and Temperament: Some children have a genetic predisposition toward heightened sensitivity to stress, often showing up as cautiousness or a tendency toward worry. These children might have a temperament that makes them more reactive to changes, new experiences, or potential threats. Their amygdala (the brain’s threat center) is more easily activated, so they feel anxious more quickly, even from smaller triggers.
Modelling and Learned Behaviours: Children often model behaviours they observe in adults, especially parents or caregivers. If a child regularly sees a parent react anxiously to various situations, the child may learn that the world is unpredictable or unsafe. Repeated exposure to these behaviours shapes their own responses, raising their anxiety baseline.
Negative Thought Patterns: Over time, children can internalize negative thought patterns, such as excessive worry about failure, rejection, or safety. As these patterns strengthen, they reinforce the neural pathways for anxious thoughts and emotions. For example, if a child repeatedly worries about social rejection, their brain becomes accustomed to interpreting social cues as threatening, reinforcing their baseline anxiety.
Lack of Coping Mechanisms: If children don’t learn healthy ways to manage stress early on, they’re more likely to feel overwhelmed by challenges, which reinforces anxious responses. Without tools like emotional labeling, relaxation techniques, or problem-solving skills, they’re left to deal with anxiety in a reactive rather than proactive way, which can raise their baseline level over time.
Chronic Environmental Stress: Growing up in a high-stress environment, such as one with frequent conflict, noise, or poverty, can also affect a child’s baseline anxiety. When the environment feels unpredictable or uncontrollable, the brain adapts by staying in a state of heightened alertness, which leads to long-term changes in baseline anxiety.
Lack of Predictability and Structure: Children often feel safest in stable, predictable environments. When they lack routines, schedules, or clear expectations, they may develop a sense of insecurity and heightened anxiety. This lack of structure forces the brain into a more reactive state, as it’s always "on guard," unsure of what’s coming next.
These factors interact in complex ways, often reinforcing each other, which makes the baseline of anxiety rise over time. The good news is that neuroplasticity provides a foundation for interventions that help recalibrate this baseline by creating new pathways for calm, resilience, and emotional regulation.
