While anxiety disorders are often debilitating, they can also heighten awareness and even save your life. Here’s one firefighter’s perspective on anxiety as a survival instinct.
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Jonathan Arenburg is a Canadian author, speaker, and trained counsellor exploring how modern life clashes with our biology—shaping anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
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While an anxiety disorder is mostly misery, there are moments when anxiety could save your life. Here’s how.
If you have an anxiety disorder, then you know how crippling it can be. Take it from me—there is absolutely nothing fun about it. Being cursed with the ability to spot a threat that others can’t? It sucks. Often, those threats are imaginary, manufactured by my anxious mind. But not always.
What’s worse, at least for me, is seeing actual threats—ones others should see. Okay, maybe that’s just my opinion. Still, it turns out that anxiety does have some utility.
While this is my perspective, it’s not without merit. My years as a firefighter showed me first-hand the consequences of missing potential threats. Take car crashes, for example. I don’t use the word accident—because most of the time, they aren’t. Accidents are rare. Irresponsible driving? Not so much. And yet, people often fail to see the danger.
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