The Grips of Anxiety

The path without and within

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I sit here at 2:30 in the morning, overcome by anxiety, wondering whether this feeling of perpetual dread will ever subside. For as long as I can remember I have endured these waves of terror, and as with everything that overstays their welcome, one wonder whether they’ll ever be allowed some peace. I feel frustrated, my eyes are dry and tired, but my heart pretends it has endured a long winded run.

What lies within the night that brings forth all our darkest shadows, kept so well hidden throughout the day? We are our own reality, that concept should come as no surprise. Whichever way we direct our attention, that is where our reality will position us. We pick and choose as we go along, for the real world is too complex for us to attend to everything. Alternatively, this means that when we concentrate on one segment of reality, we experience one type of world, and when we attend to another, we change our entire experience. There are, then, many different worlds for us to choose from at any given moment.

A steady-minded individual is flexible and participates in the world graciously. Anxious people tend to be more rigid. Their shoulders stoop, their jaws are clenched, their fists balled tightly, etc. This unbending demeanor creates a self-perpetuating vicious cycle as pessimistic thoughts harden the body, leading to increased feelings of panic. “Retreat from life leads to regression, and regression heightens resistance to life.” (Carl Jung, Theory of Psychoanalysis)

To escape from this seemingly endless loop of anxiety-prone thoughts we have to somehow alter where we point our attention. And, more specifically, we ought to go against the shrinking of our everyday perception of reality. The only alternative is falling into stagnation, and reduce the general flow of life. This feat, of course, requires an alteration in our heavily engrained patterns, an extensively difficult accomplishment for obvious reasons.

Our goal shouldn’t be to ignore or undermine our feelings, but instead to accept them. Fortunately for some, unfortunately for others, thoughts are often involuntary. Some are the results of our environment, while others are habitual. And just because the same thought tends to come to you often, does not make it real. Its persistence does not denote its validity, and neither does its intensity.

Much of our anxiety is caused by our incessant attempts at resisting negative thoughts. Ironically, the more we ignore our feelings, or distract ourselves from them, the more they persist. In short, what we resist, persists. By distracting ourselves from our pessimism we reinforce the idea that we need to live in fear of our thoughts. It implies that our mind is somehow dangerous to us, and that we have little control over it. Unfortunately, we can only distract ourselves for so long before the thoughts come rushing back to meet us.

Can the cure lie within us? I think one of the most important skills to cultivate is taking action when in the presence of fear. To accept our anxious thoughts as they happen to us at the moment. Instead of fighting against the thoughts, we ought to view them with indifference. To create a certain comfort within their presence, while simultaneously not interacting with them. We can do this by broadening our attention by, for example, focusing on our other senses, such as smell or touch. In this way we allow our thoughts to be there, while not being controlled by them. Not fighting against the thoughts deprives them of their power.

Another way to deprive them is by changing how we attend to the world with our physical body. Instead of the previously mentioned rigidity sometimes found within the very anxious, we should strive to become more graceful: “A lack of gracefulness is a sign of dis-ease. Because such dis-ease is inescapable in our culture, it is rare to find graceful bodies in the adult population. Watching people in the street, one cannot help but be impressed by how awkwardly most of them move. What is even sadder is how unaware they are of their lack of gracefulness. Many are also unaware that they have major emotional problems.”  (Alexander Lowen, The Spirituality of the Body). According to Lower, a “straight erect posture is the hallmark of the free spirit.”

None of these steps are, of course, a free pass to a life without anxiety. What more, a problem many face after years of avoiding life is finding out what it is they want to do. How does one resume a “normal” life after having spent so much of it merely existing? How can one inject meaning into what was once meaningless? According to Jung, the only way forward is “the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” 

Anyay, the sun is shining, today is a new day to take my own advice.