How does awareness affect anxiety?
Anxiety can have a few causes. It can instinctively and genetically come from threatening circumstances, or be the result of a past negative experience, causing subconscious negative reinforcement of factors (or resembling factors) involved in that experience. These can often be useful reactions in the natural world to avoid danger. But in the human world of increased comprehension, information, and awareness, anxiety can occur in a lot of unnecessary and unuseful circumstances, just as many other mental issues,
Another common and instinctive cause of fear and anxiety, is the unknown. But for an individual to be fearful of an unknown factor, they have to be aware of the factor in the first place. If an animal or person is not aware of any new factors which are unfamiliar to them, they won't be anxious about it. Therefore, awareness of more factors and concepts can cause more anxiety from being aware of all the additional unknown aspects related to those factors. This can be linked with the idea that as far as knowledge goes; often the more you know, the more you realize how much more there is that you don't know.
The additional neural combinations involved with conscious comprehension and being aware of concepts of cause and effect which connect various factors, allows additional potential for anxiety. With the extra neural combinations potentially connecting anything in someone's life to many concepts, comes the extra likeliness that one of those combinations will include something unknown. On the other hand, if an individual, such as an animal or child, is aware of and becomes familiar with additional factors which do not trigger neural connections to concepts involving additional unknown variables, then there should be no additional anxiety.
As an eg comparison; if a 5 yr old child learns that the flying objects he sees are airplanes, he wont have more anxiety, because he is too young to have the knowledge to make any neural connections to concepts involving additional unknown factors. But if a 7 yr old learns it is airplanes, they might have more anxiety resulting from this awareness, if they make the connections to concepts involving other factors which they have also learned of, such as the plane crashing. This connection of concept with alternate factors, creates an unknown combination. They might then have more anxiety that the plane might crash into their house, or anxiety that the people on the plane might get hurt, or anxiety of going on a plane themselves, after making the connection of concepts that the plane is so high in the air and they are inside. This is why additional conscious comprehension can sometimes cause additional anxiety.
Another important component in the combination for anxiety would be the physical connections of the brain of that particular individual. The natural neural connections to neurochemicals related to anxiety would be a significant component. An individual with naturally lower anxiety neurochemical reactions would have little additional anxiety from additional awareness.
When it comes to anxiety of the unknown, becoming familiar with unknown variables should cause a reduction, but sometimes only when the individual has less conscious comprehension of concepts connecting those variables. With a simpler environment and fewer neural connections of concepts, animals likely have fewer situations to trigger anxiety of the unknown, but the complexity of humanity with the stem of animal mentality can be just the environment for: Awareness Anxiety.
