Mechanisms of Anxiety and Trauma: John Hannan's Concept

The article analyzes the dynamics of anxiety and trauma based on John Hannan's Your Normal Mind concept. The main issue is the phenomenon of anxiety generalization, where the organism's safety system stops distinguishing real threats from neutral stimuli that are merely similar to them. The author explains the transition from a state of being highly sensitive to hyper-sensitive, which leads to the misclassification of the environment as dangerous. Trauma is not merely overactivity of the amygdala, but a complex change in predictive systems and contextual memory. As a result, traumatic memories can be reactivated by small fragments of situations, making pattern similarity more important to the organism than the chronology of events, thus hindering the return to a state of balance.