The truth is, the origins of anxiety disorders are still not fully defined and still largely beyond current medical research findings. We are aware, however, how to help many people who have the disorders. Often, effective treatments in medicine are based on experience, as is true for behavioral and drug treatments of anxiety. The explanation for why they are helpful often come after they have been developed rather than before. Practically, we would rather have a treatment that works and not understand why than know the cause of an illness but not be able to effectively treat it.

As research continues, it has made it somewhat clear that understanding and resolving less conscious conflicts did not always relieve phobic and obsessive-compulsive anxiety or restore individuals to normal functioning. Learning experts proposed that anxiety is a learned behavior and, therefore, could be unlearned. Simply put, if a person feels anxious in a situation, avoids it, and so decreases his anxiety, this makes it more likely that the person will try to switch off the anxiety the next time by avoiding again. This anxiety relief is bought at a cost of avoiding the feared situation and all the handicaps such avoidance brings on.

However, if anxiety-provoking situations are persistently confronted rather than avoided, people “learn” that their anxiety dies down even without avoidance. Learning theory does not explain why persistent expo¬sure to the feared situation causes the anxiety to subside.

In the theories of psychoanalysis, anxiety is said to represent a conflict hidden beneath the level of an individual’s conscious awareness. These anxieties are thought by experts to have early origins related to aggression (sometimes in the various forms of child abuse), discomfort (as when children are hungry, sick, frightened, or soiled),or sex (classically involving feelings of the infant and child for its parents). Quite logically, this theory led to psychotherapies whose purpose was to first uncover and then resolve the hidden conflict with the expectation that the symptoms symbolizing the conflict would then disappear.

By now, researchers have placed their focus on biochemical mechanisms that may cause Anxiety Disorders. The experts suggest that certain types of biochemical imbalances are responsible for these disorders and that treatment directed at correcting such imbalances will be clinically beneficial. While the therapy is based on this model is often assumed to be accomplished only with anti-anxiety drugs, it is necessary to understand that behavioral and psychological influences can cause alterations in brain functions, and that the biochemical model favors no single therapeutic approach. To the adage, “For every twisted thought a twisted molecule,” we might add, “For every straightened thought a straightened biomolecule.”