Patricia Pearson defines anxiety as fear in search of a cause. Fear is an immediate emotional response to a perceived threat, which results in potent feelings of apprehension, dread, terror and panic. In its most intense form, the fear response is specific to a time, place, moment, circumstance, or situation. In the midst of a crisis the brain releases a cascade of chemical reactions and our heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, tension and stress increase, and our breathing patterns accelerate: our body and mind is physically and mentally placed on an ancient and instinctive state of high alert known as “fight or flight.” Once the crisis we are experiencing has resolved itself, the fear response cools down and eventually, or so it should, subsides. The source and cause of this kind of fear is both clear and obvious – it is a direct response to the sudden and unexpected emergence of an emergency situation that presents a direct threat to survival.
However, fear can be more mercurial, cloaked, and insidious in our lives. We can feel fear, or more appropriately anxiety, even though the actual source or cause of our concern is veiled, misguided, or perhaps completely imaginary. In other words, a great deal of the anxiety we experience may be completely wrong because the brain responds to the imaginary and the real in a similar way. What we think, we become. One of the greatest risks we take in life is not taking responsibility for the quality, character and content of thought that inhabits our minds. Anxiety is one of the most destructive forces in our lives; under the wares of anxiety we begin to perceive the world and interpret our experience through the lens of fear, psychic tension, stress, and apprehension. Repeated enough, perceiving personal experiences through the lens of anxiety becomes both habit and addiction. All emotions have the capacity to confine us, and when they do our experience of life is skewed and distorted.
The Shadow of Anxiety: Anxiety is a powerful means to control and manipulate people. If people can be placed into a state of anxiety or fear, they only naturally desire to find a solution to rid them of those feelings. The manipulator will play both ends, that is to say, the manipulator will be the both the cause of and the solution to a person’s anxiety. The cause of anxiety is often completely manufactured or, more simply, a lie; the solution to the problem that doesn’t really exist is often nothing more than a strategy to gain influence and/or make money. Anxiety is instilled in people by manipulating their belief mechanisms; anxiety manipulation is an essential tool of religion, psychiatry and psychology, medicine and pharmacology, the news media, and of course, the corporation. It would of course be wrong to suggest that all people within these various fields of endeavour act in malevolent ways, but it is to say that the presence of anxiety manipulation is a powerful and recognizable feature in all of them.
Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making exclusive claim to its infallibility… The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained…
- Sam Harris in The End of Faith
Historically, religion has been the master of creating a false sense of anxiety in order to manipulate people’s beliefs. The threat of spending an eternity of perpetual torture in a place called hell easily stirs up anxiety and dread. Faith, that mysterious leap from real evidence to the wildly hopeful and imaginary, is the proposed solution. And thus the solution to the anxiety inducing pit of fire and brimstone is to have faith in the articles of belief as promoted and created by a group of men (usually) who somehow have the right and power to tell us what to believe and how to behave. Moreover, if we do not belief and behave in a certain manner then our fate is sealed and we will be dropped into the bowels of hell to experience an eternity of pain and suffering beyond our imagination. This version of God, it seems, lacks a sense of humour and is quite willing to commit atrocities of a sacred origin.
Religion is, in this sense, one of the most powerful forms of advertising and marketing the world has ever seen. Perhaps not too far behind are the advertising campaigns in the invention and promotion of the mental disease industry, that is to say, of psychiatry and psychology. Mental illness is a real and devastating form of existence in which people attempt to survive a state of perpetual suffering created by a dysfunctional organ known as the brain. It must be one of the most profoundly difficult ways to be forced to inhabit life. However, there are malevolent forces at work in this realm as well, and like religion, it operates under the pleasant guide of providing expertise and solutions to those in need. The industry is often incorrectly referred to as the “mental health” industry.
Our situation is really this: we create, adopt, and live by beliefs in the absence of evidence and experience. That is to say, we have a habit of adopting beliefs that have been created by other people who, in some way, we perceive to be an “expert.” An expert is a person that continues to dig the same hole deeper, until eventually all they can see is the hole. We also have a tendency to avoid questioning assumptions, and is some contexts questioning assumptions is considered taboo. While I do not wish to single out religion for a special assault, it is clear that when we question the lack of evidence for the assumptions upon which a religion is built we enter into a ground that is considered taboo. We are simply not supposed to questions the evidence for religion, we are simply supposed to believe it – and worse, have faith in it. To pose these questions is to enter into a realm of fear, anxiety, and infidelity to God – at least, that is what we are supposed to believe. On some religions, the non-believer is made to suffer and is perhaps even killed, which is of course a sacred tribute to to the love and gratitude espoused in the word of the One True God.
Our experience of being alive on this planet is the only thing we “own” and are responsible for. It does not make sense, to me, to live life in a particular manner that is unsupported by concrete demonstrable evidence. However, the infiltration of anxiety as a lens on experience distracts us from evidence, and instead scares us into adopting solutions that have no clear foundation or reason for being. Anxiety is a self-fulfilling emotional belief system, one that we are constantly bombarded with via the news media. In the sphere of news media we see a wide range of intelligent and articulate people who consistently fail to inspire or provide insight. In other words, they play the role of the fool. We have come to delight in our own bog of eternal stench, or so it seems by the endless parade of atrocities and bad news that cycles through the media sphere. If we were to actually believe news media, there would be little reason to get out of bed in the morning. Yet bad news sells, and it sells because of our addiction to anxiety – we need to feel its chemical rush or face withdrawal. In a bizarre twist we convince ourselves it is better to stay with what we know than to face the unknown.
Many products and services are sold on the basis creating a false sense of urgency/anxiety in people. This is a common form of manipulation we are all familiar with. The commercial portraying a particular lifestyle that can be “obtained” if only we purchased the product or service being advertised. Idiotic and artless slogans abound that make trite attempts at connecting products and services with something far more than they can offer. For example, “Save Money. Live Better.” equates the notion of saving money with an improved lifestyle. While modest savings on everyday items can obviously reduce the amount of money we spend, it is a dramatic leap of faith of religious proportions to assume that we will “live better” because we shop at a particular store and save a few dollars. There is no durable message within this slogan, it is tasteless, artless, and completely delusional. But the urgency and underlying anxiety is apparent, we all want to “live” better, so we better hurry up and save our money to do so.
Nonsensical Reactions: Our reactions to our situations and circumstances can be helpful, or something less than helpful. A particular reaction may or may not be appropriate. In other words, we are capable of reacting fearfully in situations that do not warrant that kind of reaction. As we repeat fearful responses, we train our body and mind to habitually and subconsciously react in that manner. Fearful reactions begin to occur more frequently and gain in intensity eventually placing the body and mind into a persistent state of fight or flight. If we believe in our minds, that a situation is a threat, our behaviour embraces fear as chronic response. From this pattern emerges from an underlying addictive relationship with anxiety.
Worry is the less toxic offspring of anxiety. When we worry about something we experience uncomfortable states of being, but worrying is something of less duration than anxiety. Worry is also associated with a specific circumstance, and is not generalized to all experience. When we are anxious, our mental state is chronically maligned in relation to our experience. While worrying can degrade our mental faculties for a period of time, anxiety changes them. When we are in a state of anxiety, the way in which we interpret and understand the world is degraded and we become the authors of our own suffering.
Pearsonnotes that anxiety is the most prevalent mental health problem in our world, and that the United States has the highest level of anxiety anywhere in the world. Apparently, both China and Nigeria have the lowest levels of anxiety in the world, and Pearson hypothesizes that perhaps these cultures are more oriented to the collective view, and even though living conditions may be less desirable, individuals spend less time reflecting on their own personal angst. Another possible explanation is that people living in Western societies have the dilemma of choice, that is, have too many possible choices to make, which in turn breeds increasingly deeper levels of anxiety. What remains mysterious, however, is how anxiety was measured in the first place. In other words there was a failure to reveal a key assumption: What is the evidence of anxiety and why should we believe it’s true?
Most of our anxiety is really a nonsensical reaction to an anticipated yet unlikely future experience. However, in the midst of anxious feelings our ability to perceive them as nonsensical is impaired. Anxiety manipulates our thoughts and imbues them with fear, panic, dread, worry, and often dark and bleak forms of pessimism and cynicism. The anxious person can be an uncomfortable presence simply because they are usually uninspiring and sometimes even depressing. The energy of their anxiety seems to invade the space around them touching people nearby. For those addicted to anxiety, the world and life itself seems to emerge from them as suffering and persecution. There is a form of mental illness called “anxiety disorder,” which I suspect is more than a mental condition – it is a failure of personal philosophy, history, and art. Anxiety disorder is, perhaps, mostly a learned state of being that our social, economic, and government institutions only serve to intensify under the guise of providing service to the public.
Learning Anxiety: We tend to externalize the cause of anxiety to something “out there” rather than exploring its source and origins within our own being. There really is no anxiety “out there” other than what we project from our own emotional landscape. Anxiety is something we learn, as much as we learn how to read and write. The womb of anxiety is the human mind, not the external world.
My anxiety is a shape-shifter. It visits me in unfamiliar guises. Phobias, in particular, tend to take me by surprise, as they rear up and then fade away depending upon the stresses in my life. One minute, I’ll be going about my business, being the sort of person who likes to fly on airplanes and to marvel at the deceptive fluffiness of clouds, and the next thing I know I’m in a state of white-knuckled panic as the jet I’ve just boarded powers itself off the tarmac. After a few years, that phobia resolves and something else—some other act or object—unexpectedly becomes the embodiment of all that is terrifying.
- Pearson, Patricia: A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine
This compelling description reaches into the essence of horror. As I read it, I imagine experiencing life in this manner, as if being trapped by phobias that constantly change within me, of panic that seems to imprison my ability to reason, and of a constantly shifting sense of terror that remains illusive to capture. Pearson’s description could almost be viewed as a form of possession requiring exorcism. What I wonder most about, however, is what are the raw materials within her mind that create these scenarios, or more specifically, what are the beliefs that are the cause of her anxiety. And how did these beliefs come to inhabit her mind, since they could not have been there at birth. Anxiety is fundamentally a learned response, and all learning requires a personal immersion into the underlying causes and sources of the condition.
Learning requires evidence, and evidence that is the sole result of personal experience, investigation and experimentation. Reading expertise and reciting facts is antithetical to learning; mindless regurgitation is the province of education. The institution of education, like religion, requires a huge leap of faith into the unsubstantiated. When we are being educated, we are simply being assimilated into the notion that someone else can decide what we must assimilate, and by the way they can also determine how we assimilate their content as well as provide us with a grade that symbolizes our proficiency in assimilation. In the absence of evidence we adopt beliefs that have no foundation and worse no relevance, even though we may delude ourselves into believing they are true. The human spirit cannot survive on unsubstantiated belief. In the absence of learning we remain shipwrecked on the barren island of knowledge.
The emotional terrain of anxiety is, as Pearson has described it, fear in search of a cause. It seems startling and frightening that we can actually fear something that has no real evidence to support it. Anxiety hijacks our ability to think with clarity, and our mind becomes opaque and unwelcoming. It seems as though anxiety is omnipresent throughout our history, society, economies, and religions. The remedy to anxiety, I suspect, is not so much a pill as it is a re-animation of learning – a way of experiencing the world that places direct evidence as the primary mode of interpreting the world. This is not to say that the opinion of others does not have a role to play – of course sharing and communication with one another remains paramount. However, the mindless adoption of beliefs, whether it be in the realm of religion, psychology or the economy should be laid to rest in the graveyard of bad ideas.
In the midst of anxiety we need to find the awareness to ask ourselves, What is the source of this anxiety? To truly engage this question is to embark on a very significant and deeply personal journey of learning and discovery. Eventually the journey will reveal the realm of assumptions, that unexplored landscape that is the cause of unsubstantiated beliefs and therefore misguided emotional habits. Ultimately, anxiety is a learning environment, a place we can inhabit in order to safely expose our weaknesses so that we may heal them. Pharmaceutical intervention cannot do this, though they may offer some form of temporary yet fragile relief from the symptoms. To look for the evidence of our anxiety requires courage and an ability to accept responsibility for emotions that hurt us and impair our ability to life live vibrantly.
Anxiety invites us to take a step into the unknown in order to learn authentically – and completely alone.
[...] toward the elimination of anxiety from his life. Ryan found Exploring Life through the article, Emotional Terrain: Anxiety – Fear in Search of a Cause, and has kindly offered to contribute an [...]