Anxiety in the News. Are They Just Trying to Scare You?

I have been thinking about information lately. Not the information we get from our own doctors, or from the people who have actually come through this and know how to talk about it. I mean the information that finds us. The stuff that shows up in a feed, or in a search result, or at the top of a news page while we were looking for something else entirely.

So I decided to take a jog through the news and see how anxiety is being presented to the public right now. I wanted to know if anything had changed since I was the one doing the searching, back when I was in the thick of it.

Before we get to what I found, hold onto this. There are two very different groups at work here, with two very different objectives. One is a group of people looking for the truth, looking for help, trying to find a way out of what they are going through. The other is an organization that needs to write a story that captures your attention. That does not mean it is badly intended. It means the objectives are different. And when two parties are working from different objectives, the needs of either one may or may not be met on any given day.

The one I liked

The first article I found was from an outlet called Science Alert, and the headline said humans have a sixth sense most people have never heard of, and that it appears to be key to mental health.

The sense is called interoception. It is the body's ability to detect and interpret its own internal signals. Heart rate. Breathing. Hunger. The temperature moving through you. All of it running quietly under the surface, all day, without anyone asking you to sign off on it. Researchers are beginning to look at how that sense may connect to anxiety, depression, PTSD and other conditions.

I doubt anyone reading this failed to see that coming.

None of it is new to us. It is the alarm system. It is the defense mechanism we talk about in the first few chapters of the book, the one the body built over a very long stretch of evolution to keep us alive. What I liked was the framing. The article was not treating that sensitivity as a defect. It was treating it as a capability we do not give ourselves nearly enough credit for.

That is worth sitting with. Those of us who have been to disorder level anxiety know exactly how powerful this system is. We have felt it run without our permission. But hypervigilance is that same immaculate sense of awareness turned up too high and pointed in the wrong direction. Same equipment. Different setting.

I think that opens a door. If this is a superpower, and I do think it is something close to one, then the work in front of us is learning to use it for good. Not shutting the system down, but stopping the flow of bad information into it, and letting it settle back to a place where it can do its job properly. That takes time and it takes work. But learning that all of this is even happening, and that we have a say in how we respond to it, is one of the biggest steps there is.

So far, so good. The jog through the news was going fine.

The one with the headline

Then I found a recent piece from U.S. News & World Report. The headline asked, essentially, whether the symptoms you have been calling anxiety might really be something else. Something more dangerous.

Dun, dun, dun.

I am not going to link it. It is not hard to find, and I do not think it helps anyone to go looking for it.

Here is the gist. A writer lays out a long list of very common anxiety symptoms. Racing heart. Shortness of breath. Shaking hands. Nausea. Stomach pain. Then the reader is reminded that each of those things could technically be caused by something other than anxiety. Then comes the list of what it could be instead.

In other words, be afraid.

I did not have to dig for this. I ran a couple of basic searches, it came up right away, and it had been published within the last week. That is the part I want you to notice. Finding it was not a coincidence, and it was not an outlier. This is a format.

Let me be very clear about what I am not saying

I am not telling anyone to be medically irresponsible. I am telling you the opposite, and I always have.

Step one, before anything else, is ruling out structural causes. That means going as deep as you need to go on the front end. Lab work. Imaging. A real checkup. For some people that takes a few weeks and for some people it takes a lot longer. Whatever it takes to prove to yourself that what you are experiencing is being driven by panic and anxiety, and not by something in the body that needs treating. This is literally the first step in the process, and I have never softened it once.

I will name the exception too, because it is real. There are health anxious people who avoid the doctor, who will not get the test, who do not want to know. That was me at points in my own journey. If that is you, take this as your reminder. We do not get to let things slide out of fear either. We clear the deck first, and then we go to work on the anxiety.

Where the article and I part ways

The piece ends with something I actually found interesting. It says one way psychiatrists separate anxiety from other conditions is by asking what came first, the fear or the physical symptom. If the dread showed up and then your heart raced, that points to anxiety. If your heart raced and then you got scared, they say, it is more likely a separate condition.

I do not agree with that, and I think anyone who has lived with physical symptoms will tell you the same thing.

Asking yourself how afraid you are of a symptom is a reasonable question. I used to run that check on myself all the time when something new turned up. How scared of this am I? Was I afraid before this started? Is my reaction to this out of proportion? That is a useful gauge and I would keep it.

But the idea that fear arriving second means the cause must be physical is simply not accurate. You can react fearfully to any sensation in your body. That is not a bug in anxiety disorder. That is more or less what anxiety disorder is. We take something ordinary, we interpret it in an extreme way, and the reaction is what turns the volume up.

That is my opinion. And I get to say my opinion here.

The article also suggests healthier people tend to shrug off a panic attack and move on. Maybe some do. I was in peak physical condition when I had my first one, and I did not shrug off anything. What decided my reaction was not my resting heart rate. It was my wiring, my learned behavior, my personality. Those are the things I had to learn to work with, and that took years.

The real point

Here is my problem with an article like that one.

It is written for people who already have anxiety. And if there is one group of people I know who do not leave a single stone unturned when it comes to their health, it is people with anxiety and panic. I do not know anyone with this condition who lets things go. Who overlooks a symptom. Who ignores how they feel. By the nature of what this thing does to us, most of us have already been screened, already been diagnosed, already been told our bodies are going to produce symptoms, and already had every one of those symptoms looked at.

So the person most likely to click that headline is not the person the article claims to be protecting. It is the person who walks away with a dozen fresh ways to misinterpret a sensation they were finally starting to make peace with.

We have all heard the advice about being careful what we consume when it comes to politics and world events. But for those recovering from anxiety disorder, we also must be mindful of the anxiety and mental health related news headlines we choose to click. They are not all created equally. And this is where it really matters, because when you are sensitized, a fear shaped headline does not land as information. It lands in your body.

So we build a filter. We learn to spot the scare structure on sight, usually right there in the headline. We lean on our own doctors, our own testing, our own research, and on the people who have been through this and know how to advise someone responsibly. And then we get back to the work, which eventually includes accepting the protest the body is sending us. The discomfort. The racing heart. The nausea. It is understandable not to like these things. Our job was to prove they were not structural, and then to go live our lives anyway.

This is not about hiding from the world. I am not telling you to avoid the news or wall yourself off from what is happening out there. I am telling you to exercise your right to use basic discernment, and to protect the hard work you have done building the right mindset.

You earned that mindset. Do not hand it over to a headline.

We went through both of these articles at length on the podcast, if you want the long version. If you would like more of this, you can read the book on Kindle or in paperback, or join the email list for free and get exclusive articles and early access to new posts. We respect your inbox. And if you have a question you would like us to answer on the show, write in and let us know. We read every one.