Root causes of anxiety can be traumatic events that cause us to change our behaviour in response to triggers. A root cause may also be something very minor but calcified over time to seem much worse than the first “event” that set things off.

However, the idea that anxiety always has a narrative such as this is overused, and doesn’t help people who just want to untangle and understand their anxiety disorder. Sometimes anxiety does have a root cause, but when it doesn’t – which Josh says is the vast majority of the time – the “root cause” narrative doesn’t actually help a clients’ progress.

Using the analogy of a house fire as a panic episode, josh says “When a fire brigade is called, their aim is to put out a fire, and then maybe investigate how the fire started, but definitely not the other way around.”

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