People often describe anxiety as feeling that they are unable to cope. It is a feeling that seems to have first arisen during a time in which a stressful event was "classically conditioned" to an automatic response of avoidance. This means that if a young person was scared, but could find no way to be comforted, that he or she learned to avoid thinking about troubling circumstances. The difficulty with this type of automatic response is that troubling circumstances have a way of arising throughout our lives from time to time. If we automatically avoid thinking about upsetting things, we gradually reinforce the anxiety until it becomes the major feeling we experience. One of the most effective ways of overcoming the automatic response of avoidance is for the person to engage in making a self-help plan and then following through on carrying it out, regardless of the intrusion of impulses to draw back or abandon the plan. Any physical activity, even something as simple as taking a walk around the block, can boost our heart rate, get our blood circulating, and clear our heads. Once we feel more energized, we can cope with troubling circumstances and fears much more effectively, and our general health is improved by the physical activity, too.