If you've spent hours Googling "what causes anxiety" at 2 a.m., hoping there's a single answer that will finally make sense of what's happening in your body — you're not alone, and you won't find one tidy cause. That's actually good news. It means nothing is fundamentally broken about you.
Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, has been treating anxiety and panic disorders since 1985. She's also lived it herself — her first panic attack hit without warning in a flower shop in 1979, and it took her fifteen years to find her way out. In her book, Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, she puts it plainly: after decades of clients from every kind of background walking through her door, there is no single trigger. Genetics, temperament, childhood environment, trauma, learned family patterns, even birth order can all play a role — and two people raised in the same household can end up on completely different paths. Barbara has anxiety. Her sister doesn't.
Anxiety is a pattern, not a personality flaw
One of the most useful reframes in her book is this: anxiety is a self-reinforcing pattern, not a character defect. It isn't caused by weakness, and it isn't something you did wrong. What keeps it alive is the cycle itself — you get anxious, then you become afraid of being anxious, which produces more anxiety, which confirms the fear. Break that loop, and the fuel runs out.
She also describes anxiety as "a perfectly logical reaction to a distorted perception." Your nervous system isn't malfunctioning — it's doing exactly what it's designed to do (protect you from danger). The problem is that it's reacting to a perceived threat rather than a real one. If your mind believes you're in danger, your body will respond as if you are, every time, regardless of whether the danger is real.
You don't need to find "the cause" before you can recover
It's natural to want an origin story for your anxiety — was it inherited? A reaction to an unstable childhood? Something that happened to you? Understanding the roots of your anxiety can be part of healing, but Barbara is clear that etiology alone won't get you better. Plenty of people can trace their anxiety back to a specific event and still be stuck in it years later, because insight without new skills doesn't interrupt the cycle. You can absolutely explore where it started — but recovery depends on what you do now, not on solving a mystery first.
The one thing you can hold onto
If you take nothing else from this: you did not cause your anxiety, and it's not a punishment for something you did wrong. Nobody signs up for panic attacks. Nobody chooses to feel unsafe in their own body. What you can do is learn new ways of responding to it — which is a completely different project than trying to figure out why you "deserve" it.
That shift — from fighting anxiety to understanding and working with it — is the foundation of everything in Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery. The book walks through 17 practical calm skills, real client stories, and step-by-step exercises built from Barbara's three decades in practice and her own recovery.
If you want to go deeper on specific pieces of this — how to stop a panic attack in the moment, why driving or flying can trigger it, how to quiet the inner critic that makes it worse — you'll find dedicated guides linked below, all built from the same book.
Ready to go further? Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery is available on Amazon, and Barbara runs a free biweekly Anxiety Relief Zoom group as well as a 6-week anxiety recovery group. Details at anxietyandpanic.net.