We might call the times we live in, ‘”The Second Age of Anxiety.”
Surveys and clinical data indicate the highest levels of anxiety since the post-war publication of W. H. Auden’s legendary poem, when the shadow of nuclear holocaust loomed.
Young people are especially afflicted in this second coming of the Age of Anxiety, faced with uncertain futures and threats permeating their phones and their schools. Men are by no means beyond the grip of noxious worry, but women suffer more disorders, with a wider range of worries about the well-being of others.
Now more than ever we need to understand the function of anxiety and how to reduce its negative effects, while enhancing its positive aspects. Yes, anxiety does have positive effects.
The First Signal
Anxiety is the first signal of the mammalian alarm system. In all animals it signals a possibility of harm, deprivation, or sexual failure. In social animals, it also signals possible abandonment or isolation. In humans, it also signals loss of status or esteem.
Types of Anxiety
Temperamental: We’re born with an emotional tone that includes a certain propensity to anxiety.
Situational: Test-taking, driving, public speaking, performance, first dates.
Symptomatic of something else: Emotional disorder, stress, depletion of physical resources (tired, hungry, ill).
Beneficial Anxiety
In small doses, anxiety is a vital feeling. Without it, we’re ill-prepared for the important tasks of life. We’d be killed crossing the street.
Actual or anticipated change in the environment, memory, or imagination stimulates anxiety. Anxiety tells us to pay attention—something bad might happen. It shuts out most information to keep us focused on the pending change. Anxiety about accidentally starting a fire gets us to stop thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, and focus on prevention—checking the gas, turning off the iron, servicing the furnace.
Among anxiety’s beneficial signals are those that tell us to improve:
Self-acceptance—when we’re too self-critical
Self-care—when we need to sleep, eat-well, exercise, practice self-compassion
Relationships—when they need attention and repair.
Problem Anxiety
We lose the benefits of anxiety when we construe it as a stop signal, rather than a caution signal. When we interpret anxiety as a red light, rather than a yellow light, we undermine its motivation to improve our health, well-being, safety, and relationships.
In problem anxiety, all signals mean that something bad will happen, and we’ll be unable to cope with it, or the cost of coping will be too great.
Characteristics of Problem Anxiety
Scanning—taking in lots of superficial information, making focus more difficult, increasing error rates
Thought-racing—thoughts that occur rapidly bypass the brain’s reality-testing
Thought-looping—thinking the same things over and over
Self-consciousness—I might be judged
Vigilance— looking for negatives; judging others.
Anxious people tend to be controlling, but not with malicious intent or desire to dominate. They try hard to avoid feeling “out of control” by keeping the environment from stimulating anxiety. Never mind that people hate to feel controlled, which means continual frustration. Attempts to regulate emotions by controlling the environment increase vigilance and worsen anxiety.
Anxiety vs. Fear
Before we discuss regulating anxiety, we must be clear on how it differs from fear. We want to regulate anxiety, but not fear.
Fear evolved in all animals to keep them safe. It’s activated by perceptions of:
- Imminent harm or vulnerability to harm
- Danger in the environment.
Anything that invokes fear will also trigger anxiety. But most things that stimulate anxiety do not pose a threat of imminent harm or vulnerability. Anxiety signals:
- Possible discomfort, failure, loss
- Danger in you (lack of capacities, talents, skills, lovability…)
Fear is involuntary, visceral (felt in the body), and fairly accurate in detecting danger. Anxiety is self-regulated (based on self-perceptions), mostly mental (in our heads), rendering mostly inaccurate estimations of reality, based on possibility, not probability.
Anxiety Essential Reads
Regulating Problem Anxiety
All good alarm systems give false positives. You don’t want a smoke alarm that goes off only when the house erupts in flames. So you accept that it goes off occasionally when people are cooking or smoking.
Biological alarm systems are also better-safe-than-sorry, which is why the central nervous system would rather be wrong a hundred times thinking your spouse is a saber-tooth tiger than be wrong once thinking a saber-tooth tiger is your spouse. We’re not descended from early humans who underestimated danger.
We must recognize that anxiety is not reality; it’s a signal about possible reality. Check out the alarm, but don’t mistake it for certainty; the smoke alarm is not the fire. Most of the time, it signals caution, not danger.
Racing and looping thoughts must have answers to form alternative synaptic connections. Never have an anxious thought without giving it an answer, based on probability. For example:
I might lose my relationship.
Consider how likely this is.
Answer: I’ll do my best to save it. If I lose it, I’ll make the best of my life. Specifically, I’ll…
No one will love me.
Consider how likely this is.
Answer: I’ll be more compassionate, which will make me more lovable.
I’ll screw things up.
Consider how likely this is.
Answer: I’ll try my best to avoid a mistake and correct any I might make.
Situational Anxiety
Use the Anxiety Formula:
Anxiety = Importance x Unknown x Perceived ability to cope
The classic example of the anxiety formula is entering a cage full of lions, which, for most of us, would send anxiety levels through the roof. It has life-and-death importance, we don’t know anything about lion-behavior, and we don’t know what to do to stay alive. Yet the same situation is exhilarating for lion-tamers. It’s important, so they must be careful, they know enough about lions to predict behaviors, and they have the skill to manipulate the big cats safely.
The most effective way to get the benefits of anxiety, while avoiding the pitfalls, is to build a conditioned response that occurs automatically with anxiety-arousal. One that automatically focuses attention on improvement. Such a skill takes practice.
Because problem anxiety has little to do with imminent danger, we must first ask ourselves,
“How important is it? How relevant to my core values?”
Much of what we worry about are petty ego offenses and things that have utterly no influence on the quality of our lives.
We reduce the unknown by learning more about what worries us. We increase perceived ability to cope by making contingency plans.