Anxiety Relief
Anxiety Culture has a great piece on worry that really stirred my pot. Anxiety is a persistent problem in our culture, and it seems to strike the affluent and poor, healthy and unhealthy, male and female, young and old alike. Anxiety is a particular breed of that umbrella term we toss around, stress, and it’s really insidious for a number of reasons. For one thing, as the piece notes, we’re sort of acculturated to be worriers. Worrying is seen as a really responsible, adult thing to do. If you’re nonchalant and fancy free, something surely must be wrong with you. Just as we give great credit to being overworked, underpaid, stressed, tired, busy, and overwhelmed, we give worrying a lot of authority.
It’s not natural, it’s not healthy, it’s not even moral (our Puritan ancestors are turning in their graves). There is no great moral imperative or increased value that worrying can confer upon you, yet we all act as if this were the case. In fact, I think worrying is a pretty immature reaction to life’s challenges. And because worrying – anxiety – is so self-perpetuating, it can quickly derail into a vicious, even neurotic cycle.
Here’s the truth: worrying is misplaced emotion. I don’t know if it’s our culture’s emphasis on sparing feelings, but passivity and enabling seem to take the place of properly assertive actions, and worrying is part and parcel. If you are worrying about something, you are attempting to control what cannot be controlled through the course of your thoughts. But no amount of thinking and fretting can change whatever is causing you insecurity. In fact, by worrying, you are possibly shirking your responsibility. Instead of owning the situation creating our insecurity, we rely on the psychologically addictive cycle of anxiety. This grants the illusion of control without actually requiring action or responsibility. Perhaps we do this because we can’t bear to accept reality as it is; perhaps we feel that acknowledging our insecurity in a nonjudgmental manner is somehow relinquishing control (or perhaps deep down we just don’t want to do anything about our troubles). But remember, no emotion or thought is a tangible thing! They only hurt you if you make them the focus of your life.
For some of us, anxiety becomes so paralyzing, we need to seek professional help to get “unstuck”. But I believe many of us can free ourselves of the trap of anxiety if we simply own our feelings of insecurity and let them be, focusing instead on action. Worrying is a false sense of ownership over your problem. The truth is that by worrying, you are not controlling your insecurity at all – it is controlling you. And thus the cycle continues.
Photo Source: The Archer Pelican
Further Reading:
10 Forgotten Stress Relief Tips
When ‘Fight or Flight’ Meets the Modern World
Banish Nervousness Forever in 1 Easy Step
Subscribe to Mark’s Daily Apple feeds
Posted By: Mark Sisson
(
I disagree. I believe greatness comes from high anxiety. As sad as this is, some of our greatest achievements and scientific breakthroughs have come in times of WAR, stressful times no doubt. Freud’s theories have been poo poo’d of late, but his theory of sexual transmission has a good bit of merit; that is our sexual anxiety is often funneled into artistic outlets. In other words, anxiety could be responsible for the Sistine Chapel, half the Louvre, and pretty much everything Salvador Dali ever painted.
Maybe this is what you are saying, that worrying WITHOUT ACTION is detrimental. And the rationality of worrying certainly seems silly as you’ve described it(accurately) as perseverating over what cannot be controlled. But I believe perseverating is necessary and good. Of course, if I’m arguing semantics, well then, boo on me.
A great manager of mine from the past said, “You’ve got to worry about everything”. He was speaking from the context of being a software development manager. What that really means though is to think things through and take action on any question. I think what he really meant was, “You’ve got to move on every uncertainty.” That’s different from worrying. That’s getting down to business and addressing the issues.
This is a great post, Just dug it up today after some back tracking through your site and was very impressed. An updated version or Anxiety/Panic 101 should be a topic for the future on MDA……