“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. That statement makes you wonder whether he ever actually felt anxiety.
How can you be free when your muscles are locked in tension and you start to shake? When you’re short of breath or feel like you’re slowly being smothered? There’s dizziness, yes, but also hands that go hot and sweaty or cold and clammy, a heart that pounds furiously in your chest, and thoughts that race at blinding speed.
Along with this assault on your senses comes a fear that you’re falling into an abyss, that all your efforts to stay in control are doomed, that you’re going crazy, that you might even die. You scan the environment for a place to escape—somewhere, anywhere—and feel an urge to run and hide.
In the midst of all this agitation, there is a path to serenity. It begins with understanding something about the nature of emotions in general. Once you step back from the experience of any emotion, take it apart, and put it under a microscope, you’ll start to free yourself from it.
Begin with the fact that human beings are feeling beings. In any given moment on any given day, we’re feeling something—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We may not always express our feelings to other people. And sometimes we’re not even fully aware of them. But feelings are happening anyway, flowing like a deep river of movement and change inside us and determining our direct experience of daily life.
We also have a push-pull relationship with feelings: We cling to the pleasant ones and we resist the unpleasant ones. While this works reasonably well most of the time, our tendency to cling and resist sometimes gets us into trouble. We adopt an adversary relationship with our feelings. We struggle to change them, control them, and fix them. At times we put so much effort into getting our emotions “right” that we twist ourselves into emotional knots.
At any moment—even when you’re feeling extremely afraid, sad, or mad—you can get back in balance. You can start to “untwist” yourself by remembering three key points about the nature of emotions.
Emotions are useful. During the course of human evolution, human beings developed emotions for a purpose. Emotions are invitations to action. This is true of unpleasant emotions as well as pleasant emotions. For example, anger prepares us to defend ourselves against a possible aggressor. Fear reminds us to avoid people, places, or things that might be dangerous. Sadness prepares us to withdraw from our normal round of activity, slow down, and take some time to recover from loss and learn from failure.
Remembering these facts can help us relax our internal struggle with unpleasant emotions a little bit. Anger, sadness, and fear are not alien experiences. These emotions are hardwired into us. They might not always be fun. But they’re normal, and our wisest option is simply to accept them.
Emotions are impermanent. No matter what emotion you’re feeling right now, you can count on one thing—it will change. Every emotion has a natural life span. Even the hottest flash of anger and the deepest sting of shame will pass away in their own time. No emotion lasts forever.
Emotions are often compared to waves. Like a wave, every emotion appears, rises to a peak, and then falls. This might seem obvious. But it’s one of the first things that we forget when we’re feeling upset.
Just as some waves rise to enormous heights, some emotions rise to great peaks of intensity. At those peak moments, we might feel that we’re drowning. The emotion feels like a destructive force of nature—a hurricane, cyclone, or flood that’s raging inside us. We worry that we won’t survive, that it’s too much to bear. We forget that this moment is just the peak of the wave. In fact, an emotion often feels most unpleasant right before it begins to recede.
Remembering that emotions are impermanent helps us ride out the waves. Sure, we might feel pretty yucky during a wave of sadness, anger, or fear. But these are not permanent occupants of our psyche. In every moment, emotions are changing. To every emotion we can apply that old saying: “This, too, shall pass.”
One of the key skills that healthy, happy people master is the patience to watch emotions come and go. At a fundamental level, there’s no need to push or pull on them. In fact, all our frenetic efforts to control emotions are doomed to failure. Feelings of pleasure will pass, no matter how much we cling to them. Unpleasant feelings will pass too, no matter how much we resist them. If we redouble our efforts anyway and try even harder to suppress or deny the emotion, then we just set ourselves up for mental health issues.
There’s one more benefit of remembering that emotions are impermanent. Even though every emotion is an invitation to action, you don’t have to accept the invitation. Our emotionally driven urges to behave come from a very primitive part of the human brain. Those urges are not always in our best interests. Even though we feel like hitting someone during a peak moment of anger, it’s not a good idea. Even though we feel like running offstage when we’re afraid to give a speech, that’s not a good idea either. And even though some people feel like killing themselves during the darkest moments of depression, that’s never a life-enhancing choice.
Fortunately, there’s another major player in our internal experience—our ability to think. As human beings evolved, the primitive parts of their brain got overlaid with new regions of gray matter. These regions are devoted to making decisions, solving problems, and creating new options. We don’t always have to act on the first urge that we feel. We can weigh the benefits and costs first. We can look for alternatives. And we can choose the behaviors that are rational, life enhancing, and aligned with our values.
Emotions have three core elements. Human beings have an astoundingly wide spectrum of emotions. Our language contains thousands of words for describing emotional states and making fine distinctions between one feeling and another. Despite their differences, however, every emotion has just three core elements—thoughts, physical sensations, and urges to behave. Consider anxiety as a case in point.
Many people experience anxiety as racing thoughts and mental images of catastrophe. In addition, the capacity to think clearly disappears, and the ability to concentrate seems like a distant memory.
The thoughts in our head are more to blame for our anxiety than any external force. When we feel anxious we begin to think about what makes us anxious, which makes us even more anxious than we already were. If you suffer from anxiety, you know how quickly your thoughts can take over and start running on their own—out of control and feeding on themselves.
In Embracing the Fear: Learning to Manage Anxiety and Panic Attacks, Judith Bemis and Amr Barrada describe how anxiety-producing thoughts can take hold of us:
It is not a bad idea to have a catastrophic thought about getting into an accident on the freeway; such thoughts could alert us to the need to be extra careful while driving. But what is troublesome about catastrophic thoughts is that they occur with such frequency. They also seem to have a life of their own. The more we try to control them or eliminate them, such as by distracting ourselves from them, the more troublesome they seem to become. Perhaps they are so frequent and so automatic because we try so hard not to have them and not to be alarmed by them.1
When we examine anxiety-based thinking closely, we discover six underlying themes.
Negative predictions. Instead of looking forward to events in the future, we anticipate the worst possible outcomes. If we’re studying for a final exam, we predict getting a low score. If we’re going to a job interview, we predict immediate rejection. And instead of looking forward to a social event, we anticipate feeling bored or embarrassed.
Negative predictions often show up as “what if” questions:
We also make negative predictions about our ability to cope with a difficult situation. Often these statements follow an “if-then” format. For example:
Focusing on the negative aspects of past events. This thinking habit leads us to ignore the pleasant and constructive aspects of our lives. For example, we might describe a relationship with a spouse or partner as a “total disaster,” ignoring the times when we had fun and supported each other emotionally.
Perfectionism. Bemis and Barrada discuss this in detail in Embracing the Fear. According to them, perfectionism shows up in
Self-judgment. As our brain fills up with catastrophic thoughts, our mind starts to wrap yet another layer of mental activity around them. We begin to heavily overthink and overanalyze what’s happening to us. We start to think about our thinking in a harsh, self-condemning way: These thoughts are ridiculous! Why am I even having them? I absolutely should not be thinking this way!
These types of thoughts are not rational, this is true, but the reality is that we often do think this way. Unless we learn to accept this fact, we can add a layer of shame and depression to the suffering that we already feel with anxiety.
Recycling thoughts. In addition to manufacturing negative thinking in these four ways, our mind creates anxiety by repeating negative thoughts. After visualizing a negative outcome for an event, we keep running that worst-case scenario in our mind. It’s as if we’re planning to fail.
Through the force of sheer repetition, recycling thoughts takes anxiety to a higher level. It gives negative predictions more power and keeps us continually focused on the unpleasant aspects of a situation.
Suppressing thoughts. It’s no wonder that people with anxiety disorders often try to escape their thoughts. This frequently takes the form of suppressing negative statements and mental images with internal commands: Don’t think about that! Don’t go there!
Unfortunately, this strategy often fails. In fact, it can have exactly the opposite of its intended effect and actually increase anxiety over time.
There are many kinds of anxiety disorders. However, they all have something in common—shifting the body into “high alert” mode. This is a powerful physical experience that’s marked by sensations such as the following:
This physical experience of anxiety has roots that go down deep into the activity of your brain. There are chemicals called neurotransmitters that carry messages between cells in the limbic system—the part of your brain that controls breathing, heart rate, skin temperature, and a host of other physical functions. When you feel anxiety, neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) are released at incredible speeds. As these neurotransmitters flood your limbic system, the rest of your body responds with the physical symptoms of anxiety. In effect, your brain pushes an internal “panic button.” And once that button is pushed, you fear that it will happen again.
Every emotion comes with urges to behave in certain ways. For instance, anger often creates urges to verbally or physically attack another person. Depression creates urges to withdraw from people and activities; shame can have a similar effect.
Anxiety creates urges to escape from real or imagined danger. In people with anxiety disorders, this “run and hide” behavior affects their lives in a variety of ways. For example, someone might feel intense anxiety about flying. But suppose that she is not required to fly for work, and her friends and family are located within driving distance of her home. She may seldom, if ever, need to confront her anxiety.
For others, the situation is much different. If their anxiety is frequent and severe enough, they will find it hard to go to work and sustain relationships with family members and friends. The symptoms of anxiety lead to a constant search for escape that disrupts their daily life.
“In combination with being constantly alert, you may be constantly ready to take any action to avoid dreaded situations, no matter how distressing they are to you and others,” writes Katie Evans in Understanding Major Anxiety Disorders and Addiction. “‘Watch out,’ ‘On stage,’ ‘Be prepared,’ and ‘Disaster plan in effect’ are likely to be constant refrains in your thinking.”2
A woman named Michelle describes how anxiety changed her behavior:
My anxiety and panic symptoms have affected my health, my self-esteem, and my family. My husband and kids never know what to expect from me, and we’ve often changed plans because of my symptoms. I’ve been to emergency rooms too many times to count. I’ve felt very depressed and even suicidal because of my problems. I’ve relied on alcohol and pills to get me out of the house but got hooked as a result.3
Attempts to escape the internal experience of anxiety fall into predictable categories. These include efforts to
As noted earlier, anxiety involves recycled thoughts. There’s a similar phenomenon with behavior. People with anxiety disorders tend to recycle their self-defeating behaviors, even when those behaviors don’t work. Despite their desperate activity, people who continually try to escape anxiety will probably tell you that their overall level of anxiety stays the same or even increases. Their self-reported experience is backed by research.5 Meanwhile, their actions become more rigid and inflexible.
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous and related self-help groups like to define insanity as doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results each time. This definition captures a key aspect of anxiety-based behavior.
You can examine thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviors as separate elements of anxiety. But, of course, these elements are not separated in real life. Thoughts, sensations, and behaviors are intimately linked. They can trigger each other and even build on each other. Anxiety turns into a self-perpetuating spiral of thoughts, physical sensations, and fears that seems to have no end.
In addition, it takes a lot of energy and time to create elaborate schemes for avoidance, self-protection, procrastination, and other self-defeating behaviors. This adds a whole other level of distress to the experience of anxiety.
Engineers often deal with systems that include feedback. This happens when part of a system’s output is channeled back into the system. For example, when an electric guitar is turned up to a high volume, the result is a loud sound. Part of this sound gets picked up by the guitar amplifier, which increases it even more.
Something like this happens with anxiety. Say, for instance, that someone with an anxiety disorder feels heart palpitations and starts to sweat, even though she has no idea why. A thought pops into her mind: “I must be afraid of something.” Even though she can’t pinpoint any object of fear, that thought instantly increases her feeling of apprehension.
In response to this heightened state of emotion, she gets another thought: “I’m going to have a panic attack.” This negative prediction starts to fulfill itself as her palpitations and sweating increase.
In an instant her mind is racing with more negative thoughts. To escape them, she resorts to an anxiety-based behavior, such as driving to a bar to have three stiff drinks or going home and yelling at one of her children. Even as she does these things, however, her anxiety increases as she condemns herself for getting stuck in the same old behavioral rut.