Anxiety is a serious social problem. Some biomedical researchers identify anxiety as an internal pathological disorder, driven by genetic predisposition and chemical imbalance requiring medication to correct. More behaviourally orientated researchers (ACT and BT) claim anxiety to be caused by dysfunctional avoidance that requires exposure and submersion in anxiety phenomena to habituate and recover. Other more cognitively orientated researchers (CBT) argue that anxiety sufferers have dysfunctional thinking patterns maintaining their anxiety.
In contrast, Smart Therapy (ST) contends that anxiety is simply a habit created by normal processes of learning and memory. According to ST, anxiety arises following stressful life events (SLEs) which cause increases in CRF, making the brain and body more vigilant to threat and giving rise to distressing physiological feelings. In response, threat-alert individuals who have encountered more past objective threat