What causes anxiety: life challenges or your personality?

How much is your anxiety driven by your traits, and how much is it driven by your life circumstances?

We ran a study to try to find out.

It seems obvious that dealing with a stressful life circumstance, like financial strain, or managing a chronic illness, might make a person more anxious than they would be otherwise. But it isn’t obvious how large of an impact this might have, or how long those effects might last. How much does anxiety relate to stressful life circumstances as opposed to personality traits or other factors? That’s what we wanted to figure out. There are some people who are likely to feel anxious even in circumstances that most people would feel are objectively good, and other people who are in situations that would make almost anyone anxious.

If you or a loved one is struggling with anxiety, answering this question of how much anxiety is being driven by one's environmental versus internal factors can be very helpful. For example:

• If a person is experiencing a lot of anxiety due to financial strain, their anxiety is likely to improve if they find a better-paying job. The most effective intervention to help this person might be assistance in finding a better job rather than teaching them anxiety management techniques.

• If, instead, that person is experiencing a lot of anxiety, which they attribute to financial strain, but that anxiety doesn’t diminish when their financial situation dramatically improves, it seems likely that internal factors are leading them to have levels of anxiety that are disproportionate to their situation. For this person, help with techniques for managing anxiety, like cognitive behavioral therapy (where they may learn to challenge unhelpful thoughts) or mindfulness techniques (where they learn to observe their thoughts less judgmentally), may be more useful interventions.

This article offers some insights into figuring that out, as well as some guidance for using that information to manage your anxiety more effectively.

If you are only interested in knowing how this applies to your life, feel free to skip ahead to the section titled “Applying this research to your own life”.

And if you want to read the full write-up of this study, with lots more detail, you can do so by clicking here.

Our study about the causes of anxiety

In order to understand the relationship between stressful life circumstances and anxiety, we developed a questionnaire and asked 419 people whether they experienced any of a list of chronic and acute stressors and when they experienced them. We looked at two large categories of stressors:

Chronic stressors are ongoing stressful circumstances that persist in time, like being a caregiver for a loved one with a severe illness, being unemployed for months, or experiencing lasting social isolation.

Acute stressors are discrete events that happen at one point in time, like an unexpected death in the family, a serious accident, or being fired from a job.

We developed our list of questions by looking at research that identified the most common high-stress events that people experience. The questions explored specific objective events rather than asking people to rate subjectively how stressful their lives were because that allowed us to disentangle a person’s internal states from their external experiences. 

For the chronic stressors, we asked people to respond with how recently they experienced the stressor, if ever. The chronic stressors we asked about were: 

• Abusive relationship

• Caregiving

• Chronic illness or disability

• Chronic severe illness of a loved one

• Discrimination

• Estrangement from family

• Financial strain

• Incarceration

• Parenting young children

• Social isolation

• Unemployment

• Unsafe environment

• Work strain

To assess acute stressors, we asked people how frequently they experienced certain events in the last 5 years. For those who had experienced the event at least once, we asked how recently they last experienced it. The events that we asked about were:

• Death of a loved one

• Job loss (not including planned departures)

• Severe accident or medical emergency (requiring going to the hospital)

• Criminal violence (e.g., being mugged, threatened with a weapon, or assaulted)

• Divorce or breakup from a cohabiting partner

• Housing loss due to eviction, foreclosure, fire, or other emergency

• Witnessing sudden death, violence, or life-threatening incident

• Disconnection from a close loved one (cutting off contact)

• Arrest

• Disaster evacuation

Participants also undertook a short assessment about their experiences of anxiety over the last two weeks, which is typically used as a measure of a person’s current level of anxiety (this assessment is known as the GAD-7) and answered questions assessing their level of the personality trait neuroticism. 

The trait neuroticism questions asked about more lasting personality traits that people ascribe to themselves related to anxiety. For example, they asked whether people consider themselves to be someone who is easily frightened, or think of themselves as a worrier. This is a measurement of the neuroticism dimension of the Big Five personality model.

What we found

The main results from our study were that chronic stressors tend to matter much more for the total sum of anxiety a person experiences in the following months than acute stress events. We suspect that this difference might be due to ongoing chronic stressors simply lasting a lot longer than discrete acute stressor events, and so even if acute stressors are worse, their temporary nature means they usually contribute less to anxiety overall throughout a person's life.

While acutely stressful events show a much weaker lasting relationship with anxiety over months or years, our study wouldn’t capture the kind of immediate anxiety response that an acutely stressful event might trigger in the moment and immediate aftermath of the event, because we weren’t assessing people immediately after acutely stressful events.

What we can say is that in the months or years after an acutely stressful event, people’s anxiety levels are typically not heavily influenced by that event. Being under a state of persistent stress from an ongoing chronic stressor is more strongly related to increases in anxiety over the time periods measured in our study, but that relationship also weakens as more time passes after the chronic stressor has ended.

In our study, we found that the effects of stressors diminish over time. A few years after a chronic stressor is over, the anxiety levels reported by someone who experienced the stressor aren’t any different from someone who didn’t experience that stressor in the first place This speaks to the natural resilience that people have. Although difficult circumstances do have an impact on our anxiety, after they are over we typically recover and return to our baselines over time.

The graph below shows what we found when we looked at just the people who reported one or zero chronic stressors. You can see that someone who experienced a chronic stressor more than 5 years ago has about the same GAD-7 score measuring their anxiety level over the last two weeks as someone who experienced no chronic stressors at all.  You can also see that a person with a recent chronic stressor reports an anxiety level about twice as high as people with no stressor or a stressor more than 5 years ago. The people who experienced a chronic stressor more than three months ago but within the last 5 years report a GAD-7 score about halfway between those other two groups.  

Our overall model was a linear regression that looked at the relationship between neuroticism, recent chronic stressors, older chronic stressors, recent acute stressors and older acute stressors as independent variables and the GAD-7 anxiety measure as the dependent variable. In the first version of this model we found that acute stressors did not have a statistically significant relationship with GAD-7, so our final simplified model only included chronic stressors and neuroticism as independent variables. Here are the results of that model:

Simplified Model - chronic stressors and neuroticism in a linear regression model predicting GAD-7 (R2 = 0.43) 

Looking at our results, we found that:

• One additional recent chronic stressor predicts an increase of .83 in GAD-7 score. 

• One additional older chronic stressor predicts an increase of .59 in GAD-7 score.

The GAD-7 has a scoring range from 0 to 21. A score of 5-9 is interpreted as mild anxiety, 10-14 is moderate, and 15 or higher is severe. An increase of over half of a point in the context of these scoring ranges is a substantive increase.

We also found that neuroticism predicts a little bit more about someone’s current anxiety level than the chronic stressors they have experienced. 

What about specific stressors?

Among the specific chronic stressors that had a reasonably large number of occurrences in the study sample, those with the largest relationships with GAD-7 were: 

• work strain

• disability or chronic illness

• financial strain

• social isolation

We don’t have enough evidence to suggest that the other stressors aren’t important as well due to small counts in some of the categories, but we can suggest that these four are stressors that likely have a substantial relationship to anxiety.

Applying this research to your own life in order to manage your anxiety

If you are experiencing a high level of anxiety, and you're trying to understand it, there are a few potentially useful things to learn from this research.

1. Look specifically at the ongoing and recent stressful situations in your life. Especially if you are under severe financial or work strain, managing a chronic illness or disability, or experiencing social isolation, those factors could be having a substantial impact on your current anxiety level. Seeking help with managing those particular stressors (and working to improve them if they involve factors you can control) may be the most important step to managing the associated anxiety symptoms you may be experiencing. If you notice that you have a pattern of anxiety that seems to continue both when you have more stressors and when you have fewer, that suggests that there may be internal factors at play, such as beliefs or behaviors that contribute to your anxiety. In such cases, seeking therapy with a specialist in anxiety, or learning about evidence based approaches to help anxiety may be valuable to you.

1. With currently ongoing chronic stressors, it’s useful to think about whether the situation you are dealing with is something that you can change or something that you’re going to need to continue managing for the foreseeable future. 

If the chronic stressor is a situation you can change, that may be the most effective approach to managing the anxiety that is coming from that stressor. For example, if your work environment has become especially toxic, looking for a new job or finding a way to change who you work with at your current job may be a good approach.

If you are managing a chronic stressor that you are unlikely to be able to change and that you are likely to be continuing to deal with for a long time, recognize that these ongoing stressors take a toll. It may be helpful to seek support for both dealing with the chronic stressor and managing anxiety symptoms that it generates. Even in objectively difficult situations, sometimes psychological treatments can help you cope better with the situation.

If the chronic stressors in your life are further in the past and you’re still experiencing a high level of anxiety, or if you find that you tend to feel anxious even when external events in your life are going well, consider tools and treatments that address the anxiety itself.

1. In any of these cases, if you’re experiencing a level of anxiety that is unpleasant or is getting in the way of things you need to or want to do, it’s useful to know that anxiety itself is not dangerous to you. Some of the symptoms of anxiety, like a racing heartbeat, can feel scary themselves, which can lead to feeling even more anxious. Remembering that anxiety is coming from your threat detection system trying to warn you about something, but that your threat detection system may be miscalibrated, can be helpful for putting anxiety symptoms in context. Seeking help from a therapist or self-help resources may be useful regardless of the underlying sources of your anxiety, but understanding whether the source is likely to be situational may guide what you choose to focus on when working with either a therapist or self-help resource, or even when you're working through your challenges without formal help.
   

If you’d like help working out whether you can change a stressor and how, why not try our Resolve Harmful Situations tool. This tool will help you think through your options, using a simple decision-making framework.

Launch the Resolve Harmful Situations tool