Imagine you’re an early human out picking huckleberries. You’re feeling giddy in the warm afternoon sun after huddling in your cave, enduring ten days of cold spring rain.

There you are, filling your basket, cheerfully belting out, “Oh My Darling Clementine” with berry juice dripping down your chin. Suddenly, the other side of the berry bush starts to move and you hear a growl.

Before your conscious mind even registers that it’s a bear, your amygdala has already sent out an emergency alert to other parts of your brain to flip into emergency mode.

Your sympathetic nervous system takes control. Adrenaline and cortisol soak your bloodstream. Your heart races, your breathing gets shallow and rapid, grabbing as much oxygen as it can. Your body temp goes up, your palms start to sweat. Blood flows out of your core to your extremities, giving you the strength to fight or the quickness to flee. Your mind focuses only on self-preservation with no objective self offering perspective. There’s only you and the bear.

Except, there’s no bear, nor even a shadow resembling a bear. There’s just you and your goofy amygdala, randomly firing out SOS. Your amygdala or “primitive” brain, which takes charge in emergencies, no longer waits for danger signals before reacting. It randomly declares emergencies, sending your nervous system through the entire response sequence, without an initial stimulus.

If your brain weren’t engaged in emergency mode, you might even giggle, “Oh, silly amygdala. C’mon, there’s nothing to be anxious about.” But, you cannot override what your automatic, unconscious, sympathetic nervous system has begun. That’s the whole point of the unconscious aspect: it will react to keep you out of perceived danger regardless of what your conscious mind is focused on.

Eventually your conscious mind will send an all clear. In the meantime all the physical symptoms have been repeating themselves: racing heart, rapid breathing, adrenaline surges.

If you don’t have anxiety and want to understand what it’s like, imagine you do come across a bear in the woods. Next, track all the sensations that visual brings up in your body. Now imagine those sensations occurring randomly, with your brain on auto-pilot, so it can’t hit the “No Bear” re-set button. That’s what it feels like to have anxiety: out of nowhere your amygdala shouts, your body responds and whether or not there’s actually a bear makes no difference at all.