Emotional Terrain: Anxiety
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 the midst of a crisis the brain invokes a pervasive feeling of tension and stress. Once the crisis we are experiencing has resolved itself, our fears begin to dissipate eventually subside. Acute anxiety is the result of a sudden and unexpected emergence of an emergency situation that presents a direct threat to survival. In this sense, the anxiety we experience is helpful in that it puts us on high alert in order to bring our complete attention to resolving the threat at hand.
However, anxiety can be more mercurial, cloaked, and insidious in our lives. We can feel a general sense of anxiety even though the actual source or cause of our concern is veiled or completely imaginary. Chronic anxiety affects us even though there is no immediate or apparent threat, except the threat we imagine in our mind. Our thought patterns, whether they have a basis in reality or not, cultivate emotional habits. Anxiety can become both habit and addiction. It is a grave risk to ignore the quality, character and content of thought that inhabits our minds. Anxiety can become one of the most destructive forces in our lives; under the wares of anxiety we perceive the world and interpret our experience through the bias of fear, worry, tension, stress, dread, and apprehension.
The Realm of Anxiety: Our reactions to the various situations and circumstances we find ourselves can be helpful or unhelpful. We are capable of reacting fearfully in situations that do not pose an immediate threat. As we repeat fearful responses, we train our body and mind to habitually 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 stress and tension. If we believe in our minds that a situation is a threat, even when there is no meaningful threat, our behaviour becomes seduced by chronic sense of anxiety. Anxiety seeks addiction.
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 maligned and degraded. While worrying can degrade our mental faculties for a period of time, anxiety can assimilate our mind. When we are in a state of anxiety, the way in which we interpret and understand the world is delusional and we become the artists of our own suffering.
Pearson notes 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. Most of our anxiety is really a nonsensical reaction to an anticipated yet hypothetical 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 because their energy is unsettling. The energy of their anxiety seems to invade the space around them touching people nearby. For those addicted to anxiety all experience originates in suffering and self-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. I suspect that anxiety disorder is possibly a learned state of being, rather than a chemical imbalance that can be resolved through medication.
Anxious Weaponry: Anxiety can be a powerful means to control and manipulate people. If people can be placed into a state of anxiety, then they can be controlled and manipulated. The manipulator seeks to create anxiety and offer a solution to it. That is to say,the skilful manipulator will play both ends and mastermind a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. The cause of anxiety is often completely manufactured; the solution is often nothing more than a strategy to gain influence and/or make money. Anxiety is instilled in people by manipulating their belief mechanisms, and in this sense anxiety 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 use of anxiety to gain control is a common feature.
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
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 manufactured by a group of men (usually) who offer a solution to a problem that is wildly delusional. 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 horrendous atrocities.
Religion is one of the most potent 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, 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 brain. It must be one of the most profoundly difficult ways to be forced to inhabit life. However, there are other 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. It rally should be the “mental disease” industry in which diseases of the mind are invented in order to sell a solution.
Anxious Beliefs: Unfortunately we are able to create, adopt, and live by beliefs in the absence of meaningful empirical evidence. 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.” We also have a tendency to avoid questioning assumptions, and is some contexts questioning assumptions is considered taboo. We are simply not supposed to question the evidence for a religion, we are simply supposed to believe it – and worse, have faith in it. In some religions, the non-believer is made to suffer and is perhaps even killed, which is of course a delusional 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 the only thing we are absolutely responsible for. It does not make sense to live life in a particular manner that lacks 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 can morph into a self-fulfilling emotional belief system.
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 and unknowable. Pearson’s description could almost be viewed as a form of possession requiring exorcism. What are the raw materials within her mind that create these scenarios? What are the specific beliefs that are the source and essence of her anxiety? How did these beliefs come to inhabit her mind? Penetrating the root of our anxiety requires direct immersion into the underlying causes and sources that cultivate its existence.
Learning is intimate with empirical evidence. Authentic evidence is that which is the sole result of personal experience, investigation and experimentation. Reading outside 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 and the abstract. When we are being educated, we are simply being assimilated into the notion that someone else can decide what we must know and be able to do. In the absence of empirical evidence we adopt beliefs that have no authentic foundation and therefore no real relevance, even though we may delude ourselves into believing they are true. The soul cannot thrive on the acquisition of unsubstantiated belief.
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 is insubstantial. Anxiety hijacks our ability to think with clarity, and our mind becomes opaque and unwelcoming. Anxiety is pervasive throughout our history, society, economies, and religions. The remedy to anxiety 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, and of course sharing and communication with one another remains paramount. However, the mindless adoption of beliefs in the absence of personal experience, whether it be in the realm of religion, psychology or the economy should be laid to rest in the graveyard of bad ideas.
Eventually the journey will reveal the realm of assumptions, that unexplored landscape that is the cause of unsubstantiated beliefs and therefore misguided emotional habits. Anxiety is a learning environment, a place we can inhabit in order to expose our weaknesses so that we may heal them. 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. Our anxiety is an invitation to venture into the unknown and the uncomfortable in order to reveal the nature of our beliefs and thought patterns. Once the frailty of our beliefs and assumptions are revealed we place ourselves in a position to move through our anxiety and eventually integrate it into a more resilient identity.