3. On Anxiety
I had no understanding of anxiety, nor its impact on my everyday life and mental state of mind, until into my mid-30s. Yet there it was, nawing away at me and leaving me feeling like I was helpless in its wake. And the most confusing part was that I was completely unaware of it.
The biggest cause? A few things, most likely. But one of the ones that I nailed it down to was living abroad. It was amazing the ease with which I would find myself lost down a rabbit’s warren of scenarios and possibilities of what it mean move to back to my home country, the pros and cons, the sacrifices and opportunities. The over-riding sense of confusion that comes along with that process. And it’d all begin with something so tiny. Like the sun shining.
I’m from Cape Town, South Africa, where we’re lucky to have a lot of sun. And, so, when I felt it in the UK it’d send my mind back to home. I’d miss the sense of what that warmth used to mean; family, friends, braais (bbqs), pools, good times. And then the uncertain questions would come, just like an over-bearing South African accent in a quiet coffee shop.
‘Should I move back home? What would that mean for work? What would that mean for friendships? Who might I let down? What if it didn’t work out? What if..what if…what if…’
It was exhausting. For me. For those around me. I was living in uncertainty, but badly. I was letting it take hold of and dictate my life. I didn’t know how to fight back.
I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up in an age where mental health has been given a platform. It’s been de-stigmatised to a large degree in the societies I’ve been exposed to, allowing many to at least begin stretching out the chains of previous repressions, if not freeing themselves entirely. I’m lucky.
This new form of freedom has placed a spotlight on the awareness of anxiety. Many have been encouraged to pursue and understand the sources that drive those undeniably awful and visceral feelings. This is a good thing.
But for some it also creates the potential for anxiety to be treated like an erratic stray dog; something to be avoided from the other side of the street lest it turn into something more dangerous - or a thing we cannot handle.
These experiences have taught me something that fundamentally altered the way I see anxiety in my life. It’s not something to be avoided, or shunned, it’s designed to be useful to us. But, like with everything, how we choose to define our relationship with it determines whether we can use that to our advantage, or whether it takes the reigns.
Anxiety is our in-built alarm.
Ding-dong. Another feeling is at the door.
Anxiety is designed to be useful to us, not something we should avoid.
Anxiety is apprehension, a nervousness, about something uncertain in the future.
Uncertainty lies at the heart of anxiety. As a result, it has a strong connection to our sense of time, and therefore how we experience life, now and moving forward into the future. None of us really know what lies ahead.
It’s different to fear. Fear is present; you’re certain there’s danger facing you in that moment. You’re confronted with a snarling lion, or a stranger bearing down on with you a knife. Fear forces you to react in that instant to confront the danger, often from our mamallian part of our brain. It’s instinctual. It’s an adaptive behaviour; one we’ve necessarily developed to keep us alive over millennia.
But anxiety is very different. It’s about something you haven’t seen yet; it’s centred on an uncertain, or unknown future event. It’s often caused by your mind simulating what’s possible, not reacting to what’s in front of you. It’s the feeling of your thoughts conjuring a series of potential outcomes and scenarios when faced with an uncertain event or decision or situation. It comes from a very different part of the brain because it requires imagination and an ability to project yourself away from the current moment, often causing us to bring to mind, even fixate on, the worst possible scenarios in many cases. And, quite frankly, it sucks. It feels horrible. The stark reality of how bad it can make us feel is the very origin of the word. It comes from the Latin, angore; to choke. There is a clear link to the physical reactions we have when we feel it.
So, if fear keeps us alive by forcing us to react to a clear and present danger, what is the point of anxiety?
Photo by Finn on Unsplash
Unfortunately, anxiety has to feel awful, because otherwise we wouldn’t pay attention to it. If it was a nice sensation, like with most things we would simply become accustomed to it, and start to ignore it over time.
So, as we begin to unpick why we have this built-in feature, a good question to ask is:
‘What do we gain from being able to imagine future and potential scenarios (good or bad)?’
This ability gives us the opportunity to come up with plans, and to potentially take action to prepare for these uncertain future scenarios. We can make choices in the present that will help us to deal with those situations if or when they might arise.
Therefore, those horrible feelings exist as a kind of in-built alarm that we all have. That we all need. It’s designed to make you sit up and take notice by saying,
“Hey! I think you’re going to care about how this situation unfolds - perhaps you should start thinking about how you want to deal with it?”
So when we’re faced with something uncertain approaching on the horizon - an event, someone’s reaction, an outcome from a previous decision or action we’ve made - anxiety is a natural response in us that alerts us to the possibility that we may be invested in the outcome of an uncertain situation.
When viewed in this way, anxiety is giving us the opportunity to choose how to respond in the here and now in order to prepare for something uncertain in the future.
Now, that choice may well involve not doing anything at all. It might be that, upon reflection on a spell of anxious feelings, we choose to admit that the thing that made us feel that way isn’t actually that important. That we don’t care about the outcome enough to take action towards it. And so we can let go of what might be causing that anxiety, or do something about it. But we get to be the ones to choose. And once we have the sense of control, we start to feel less anxious.
“The essence of being an emotionally intelligent person is being able to know when an emotion deserves a response and when an emotion deserves to be acknowledged, experienced, and then politely shown the door.”
Anxiety isn’t automatically a sign of a malfunction, a disease or a disorder (although extreme and clinical cases do, of course, exist*).
It’s a triumph of human evolution.
It’s an emotion.
Charles Darwin, the great theorist on our survival instincts, wrote about the adaptive value of emotions. In other words, why we experience them in the first place. He summarised that they should not be something we should suppress or eradicate. We need to listen to them, and use them to develop ways of coping. Emotions are there to give us information about ourselves. So we can choose how to respond.
As a result, contrary to what many might want you to believe, emotions are profoundly rational.
How we choose to respond to them might not be, but on their own, they are. They evolved to give us information about ourselves.
For example, someone faced with the scenario of being passed over for a promotion might turn red in the face, bang a fist on the table and slam the door on leaving. But these actions in themselves are not anger. They are the outcomes of how someone has chosen to respond to the feeling of anger, consciously or subconsciously. The emotion itself is simply information. In this instance, as is often the case with anger, the signal from that particular emotion is that a desired goal (promotion) has currently been blocked. We get to choose how to respond to that information; fist-banging and loud voices, or calmly asking how we could improve to be considered for the next one. But the feeling of anger that flashes within us tells us that the goal is important to us. That’s the information, and is separate from the response.
Anxiety, being just another emotion, is an automatic appraisal that a future outcome is uncertain, but it’s something we potentially care about.
This is the information that anxiety is giving us. Whether we should care about the outcome, or how we should respond to it, is up to us. But the information that anxiety provides us should always be listened to, even if not acted upon. It’s in these situations that it can become incredibly helpful.
Anxiety, therefore, is more than just protective, it’s productive.
In today’s society, there’s more complexity, alongside a bunch of inherent uncertainty.
We’re bombarded by questions such as:
‘Will we have status within certain groups (work, friends, community)?’
‘How do I feel about the relationships in my life?’
‘What does it mean to be well (in an era of toxic standards of positivity)?’
These might not be classic survival needs in the purest form, but our brains perceive them as being that because we see them as being so important to our modern day perception of survival.
Because anxiety by its very nature is about dealing with uncertainty in the future, it has a very real time component to it. That’s why certain actions we can take in the present can help us to process the information it is giving us.
For example, many people cite exercise as being a key way to work through feelings of anxiety. And that’s not surprising; the act of exercise commands us to immerse ourselves in the present. It forces our brains to divorce ourselves from the future. That tangible mental break makes us more likely to be able to listen to the information that anxiety is presenting, rather than getting lost in the feelings it is invoking.
And this information might not always be helpful. In many cases the right course of action to take in the now to address feelings of anxiety could be about letting something go.
To return to exercise; how often do previous anxieties seem to disappear or diminish in size after we’ve done something active? Perhaps because what we thought was important when we lived in the future, become much less so when we were forced to face the present through hard exertions.
And for those problems that still persist, we now have a clear signal that we are right to feel anxious. Because our anxiety is telling us that whatever we are encountering is important to us. And if something is important to us, it’s worth making a plan towards. To take actions that will help us to overcome that obstacle or rise to that challenge.
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
Putting Anxiety into practice
Would this give you anxiety?
Imagine you are about to take to the stage to sing in front of a crowd of strangers, or give a talk on a particular topic.
It’s easy to imagine that when faced with the above scenario that you might be seized by feelings of anxiety. But we can view that situation entirely differently by listening to our anxiety.
The information it’s telling us is that performing in front of others might be important to us; it could really mean something to us and how we see ourselves. Therefore, we should practice as hard as we can to give ourself the best chance of performing as well as we can. Or, if a performance really doesn’t mean anything to you at a core level, then you should just get up there and crack out your best Mariah without giving a damn because it’s not something that actually matters to who you truly are. We give ourselves the space to choose our response by acknowledging the emotion itself.
But if we suppress that anxiety, or ignore it, we’ll likely never step on that stage in the first place. And never be motivated to achieve and pursue something that our bodies are telling us may be important.
Do I have anxiety about posting this article? Of course. Because writing about these thoughts is important to me. So anxiety is is telling me that I care about what I’m doing. It’s up to me as to whether or not I choose to embrace it in the knowledge that feedback or criticism can only improve me as a writer, or let it overwhelm me and never share it at all.
“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate”
Soren Kierkegaard refers to anxiety in a way that perhaps best captures what it is to be anxious for many of us when he says, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”. In this case, freedom is meant in its truest form; to think about, invent and create limitless potential outcomes to an uncertain event.
He talks about the danger of “people who lose themselves in the infinite”. By this, he means people who spend all their time deliberating over possible decisions and scenarios, but never actually progress to making a decision or choice. They live in the infinite, constantly obsessing over what could be, whilst simultaneously not doing anything about the situation.
That sounds like the perfect recipe for living in anxiety. Because it doesn’t involve any action by way of response to the emotion.
I still don’t know if moving back home is the best decision for me. But I know it’s important to me. My anxiety has told me that. So each day I’m taking little steps to put a plan into action to help me to figure it out in a more concrete, tangible way. The outcome is divorced from the process, and I’m able to do something about the situation.
For Kierkegaard, when faced with anxiety, he believed that it is the process of making decisions and acting on them that is crucial to getting out of a state of limbo - and in this way, we can benefit from the information that our anxiety gives us.
To end, a quote that provides a lighter twist to what can be a very heavy subject - but creates wonderful perspective:
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
Anxiety is a natural alarm.
It’s designed to be useful to us, not something we should avoid.
*Anxiety disorders are of course real, but are officially defined as when coping mechanisms start getting in the way of our ability to function, or perform certain behaviours. E.g. not going outside because you’re socially anxious. They deserve to be treated by a professional or medically when diagnosed as spiralling out of control.
These posts are written to remind our readers that; Life is hard, we’re all just trying our best and we could all do with a little help, no matter where it comes from.
How did the thoughts above impact on how you think about Learning from Anxiety? We’d love to hear your comments below.
The inspiration for this piece is this discussion between Modern Wisdom podcast host, Chris Williamson, and Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. Dr Dennis-Tiwary is an anxiety researcher & author, founder of Wise Therapeutics, psychology and neuroscience professor.