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Anxiety

Updated: Feb 2

The stomach lurches and the throat tightens. The eyes twitch and the mind zig-zags across endless possibilities. Your chest is tight, trapped, encased, oppressed. Unlike fear or worry, which usually have a defined cause, anxiety buzzes hungrily around the buffet of life’s problems, alighting on ordinary troubles and turning them into visions of disaster and catastrophy. It makes us fidgety and breathless. It’s inhibiting. It’s contracting. It’s easy to recognise its pinched and constricted feeling from the word’s Greek roots: anxiety comes from angh (to press tight, to strangle, to be weighted down with grief).

W.H. Auden wrote "Now is the age of anxiety." He may well be right on that...


Anxiety


The history of anxiety

That anxiety is a curse seems inevitable in the twenty-first century. So, it might be a surprise to discover it only became thought of as an affliction a hundred or so years ago – and that, before then, some philosophers spoke of feelings of fear and anguish as an enriching response to discovering one’s own freedom.


The idea that anxiety might be an illness was first suggested in 1893, by the Wiesbaden psychiatrist Ewald Hecker, and two years later by his more famous Viennese colleague Sigmund Freud. They called it Angstneurose, and Freud thought it offered a more precise alternative to the vague catch- all neurasthenia, with which many patients were diagnosed at the time. Among Angstneurose’s symptoms were oversensitivity to loud noises, night terrors, heart palpitations, breathing irregularities and excessive sweating. But one feature dominated: ‘anxious expectation’, or fearing the worst. Freud believed one of the major causes of the neurosis was an ‘accumulation of excitation’, or, in today’s terms, ‘sexual frustration’. For Freud, anxiety was libido gone sour, related to genuine desire “In the same kind of way vinegar is to wine”.


In the 1940s, amid the psychological wreckage caused by the war, the poet W. H. Auden was moved to speak of an ‘Age of Anxiety’. The governments of Britain and the United States attempted to stem the tide of anxious feelings, employing psychologists to measure and improve the population’s ‘serenity’ and ‘security’ – an undertaking which resembles today’s happiness agenda. By the time Miltown, the first of the blockbuster tranquillisers, hit the market in 1955, followed by Valium in 1963, anxiety had become a multimillion-dollar industry, and the twentieth century’s signature psychiatric condition. By the 1960s, however, the ‘Age of Anxiety’ was on the wane. A new illness – a rare condition known as ‘depression’ – was catching on, in part due to new diagnostic reclassifications encouraged by a rapidly expanding pharmaceutical industry. Today, anxiety is once more on the rise, and has recently overtaken depression as the most commonly diagnosed disorder in the United States, with an expansion in the different types of anxiety it is now possible to suffer (in the most recent edition of the psychiatric diagnostic bible the DSM-V, there are twelve). As in the late nineteenth century, more women than men are diagnosed.


For the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born some forty years before Freud, the idea of anxiety as a widespread psychological disorder would have been hard to countenance. He believed it was not possible to think about human existence without understanding our emotions, even the more burdensome ones. He spoke of us as trembling, terrified, sickening creatures – and one of the emotions which particularly intrigued him was, in Danish, angest, a combination of anguish about the present and dread about the future. With its asides and jokes, its subversions and pastiches, his 1844 treatise Begrebet Angest, translated into English as ‘The Concept of Anxiety’ exactly a hundred years later, is so labyrinthine that just trying to read it would make anyone anxious. Kierkegaard argues that angst is the appropriate response to realising life is not predetermined, but that we have absolute freedom to make any choice we want – and total responsibility for the outcome. “He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy,” writes Kierkegaard. But though this vertigo might be unnerving, a capacity to feel it is a hallmark of a life lived authentically. Only the “Most spiritless have lived without anxiety,” he proclaimed. The challenge was not to avoid the panicky fretful feelings, or become paralysed by them, but to learn to acknowledge and understand the significance of the choice they offer. So, he would probably be alarmed to see how we treat anxiety today, as something to be freed from, rather than evidence of freedom itself. Only a “Prosaic stupidity,” he cautioned, would dismiss such an important feeling as a mere illness. Some might see emotions as a gift, from which we learn, rather than as medical conditions affecting everyone. In either case, the symptoms are very real and can be totally overwhelming to the point of suicide attempts. Kierkegaard wrote emphatically “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”


Where does our anxiety come from?

The great philosopher Epictetus wrote that “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.” Michel de Montaigne wrote sardonically “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.” This is why we should face our problems head on – we can handle them. Anxiety stems from our ego: Kahlil Gibran wrote “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.” 


Brené Brown reminds us of the importance of authenticity, writing “If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.” 


Perhaps anxiety teac hes us and guides us. Edvard Munch wrote "Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder." Further, it may inspire creativity. And creativity is the source of our success. T. S. Eliot wrote "Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity."


Worrying won't stop the bad stuff from happening it just stops you from enjoying the good.


What helps with anxiety

There are many medical treatments for anxiety. Yoga, meditation, being present, being in Nature, breathwork, slowing down, unhooking your Self from negative thinking, and spirituality all also work wonders for anxiety. Henry David Thoreau wrote "There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of Nature." Radhanath Swami wrote "Religion is meant to teach us true spiritual human character. It is meant for Self-transformation. It is meant to transform anxiety into peace, arrogance into humility, envy into compassion, to awaken the pure soul in man and his love for the Source, which is God." Amit Ray says reassuringly “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” Breathwork really does work on anxiety! Try it for your Self: Click on this link for my article about breathwork:



Click here for my article on meditation:



And remember what Plato said "Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety." Dr Wayne Dyer adds "The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it's your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can't package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking."


Worrying is like paying a debt that we don’t owe. If it’s out of your control don’t worry about it. Nothing binds us except our thoughts. Nothing limits us except our fears and nothing controls us except our beliefs.


These are the emotions that I have covered for you in my series on emotions (click on the link to be taken to them):


Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you: Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.


George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Are you ready to change your mind?


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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