Anxiety is really an instinctual urge to run or hide. It can manifest for many reasons, but given that life can be dangerous and troubles do come down regularly, some degree of anxiety is absolutely unavoidable.
The problem, of course, is chronic and ambient anxiety. This is I think always a mismatch between perceived troubles and perceived capacity. As one example, some people feel no fear jumping out of airplanes, and others are paralyzed by the thought of driving a car, or being in a crowd, or even being outside.
Perception thus easily becomes reality, and if that reality is one that is unpleasant, then the task is to alter perception. As I wrote a few days ago in my notes (not published here yet), it is possible to feel trapped while free, and possible–paradoxically and in large measure theoretically, from a practical perspective–to feel free while objectively trapped. This sort of freedom is something many ascetics have sought, such as the monks and nuns who wall themselves into small rooms for years.
And there are two levels of anxiety: pure fear, and the fear of fear, or what I have decided to call for now meta-anxiety. I don’t know if that is a good term, but it will do for now as the fear of fear, which is really the fear of hyperarousal, itself the result of traumatic helplessness. This would be something like a panic attack. If you have ever had one–and I have–you learn to fear them. I think most normal people would and do go to great lengths to avoid repeating them.
[if you do have panic attacks, by the way, and have not yet mastered them, this is a really great resource: www.panicaway.com
What is great about this system is that it cures you. It really works. I have not had a panic attack in 15 years or more.]
And actually the term I came up with the other day was metaemotion, which is a feeling about feelings. You can feel fear of shame, before you feel the shame. Fear of shame is one of the glues that keeps human societies together.
And it occurred to me the other day there are two levels to learned helplessness. The original studies were done on dogs, so I think this distinction was missed.
Learned helplessness, purely, is behavioral. The dogs were “taught” to stay on electrified plates even when they could escape. A painful stimulus was induced, and they did nothing.
But in humans there is an emotional aspect: you can be trained into feeling YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOUR EMOTIONS, that waves of something bad can sweep over you, and there is nothing you can do about it.
And in humans, this is by far the more important aspect. The helplessness is relative to STATE MANAGEMENT.
And here is the point I logged on to make: there are three ways of dealing with anxiety.
- By developing the emotional skill of State Management, such that painful feelings can be endured long enough to develop confidence and relative control. Tom Cruise, in the movie and I think in reality, taught himself to feel GOOD in a tightly confined cockpit, operating at high speeds, and under considerable physical duress. Anxiety can both be managed, and eventually transformed into ENGAGEMENT, or a sense of adventure, a thrill, excitement. This is what animates rock climbers, and sky divers and other thrill seekers.
- By intoxication. Drugs, booze. You achieve “state management”, and at that RELIABLE state management, by physically altering your reality. Me, I still like to get drunk sometimes, but I don’t think I ever put it to myself quite like this.
- By OBSESSION. This is the one that really surprised me. It just popped in my head, but it is true. I am obsessive. I always have been, and this is why. What Obsession does is insert itself into the place of anxiety, such that every waking thought crowds out the fear and dismantles any perception of it.
Logically, an immature society–as ours in large measure is, not least because of the lack of genuine challenges, and the lack of a need to develop the maturity to manage them–is going to have enormous problems with anxiety. We deal with it through distraction, frivolity, by flitting from one thing to another, which amounts to an obsession with stimuli.
We also deal with it, of course, with drugs and alcohol.
But, and here is the second point I wanted to make, in many respects our polarization amounts to an outcome of political obsessiveness, itself the outcome of ambient anxiety. People are fixated on the latest grievance, the latest outrage, and there is enough out there for anyone to get their fix daily.
What is lost, obviously, is nuance. Nuance is a mature emotion. It implies balance, time, consideration, and even a certain generosity. It implies a willingness to listen carefully, to allow facts and feelings to multiply and grow and eventually reach some kind of synthesis.
And putting it this way, Black and White thinking is, I think, almost necessarily and invariably an outcome of fear. So when you see it, you are seeing anxious people dealing in an immature way with a world which frightens them.
It’s astonishing to me how much progress we have made in the physical sciences, without having learned how to generalize the learnable and trainable skill of State Management. Every child should be taught this. Nothing but good could come from this, if it were done intelligently by sincere and competent people.
And specifically, I am talking things like Biofeedback–of which Neurofeedback is a distinct subcategory–competent meditation, somatic psychotherapy, training in the basics of cognitive psychology and the like.
And I think I have mentioned this, but Milan Kundera talks about how what he REALLY wanted from Communism was dancing circles. It was in a book of fiction, but that was likely true. We need communal events, where all are included, that include play and celebration. Look around you: do you see any? Sports, maybe a little. Church, to some extent, but you have to believe what they are teaching, and many of us just can’t, and in any event my personal experience is that it is fucking serious and a lot of those people are just not sincere.
My work continues. I am making progress. I feel that. My basic objective remains the same, to form some sort of group that reliably meets these needs.
But I still have many miles to go. I still have, deep down, an occasional cruelty that is simply the mark that was left on me by the cruelty of others. But it does not belong in a place where I am asking for trust. I don’t trust me, and won’t ask anyone else to until my work is done.
I was contemplating a podcast the other day, and some little voice said “not yet”. And I asked “when”? And on impulse I looked to my left and saw a crane landing in a pond. I have never seen a crane before outside a zoo, that I can recall, so I took that as a sign that at the new year it may be time. Cranes and babies. Then I was like (trust me, you would not want to be the one trying to operate my little brain), no it’s storks. That was nothing.
Then just now, I looked it up, and found this: https://www.livescience.com/62807-why-storks-baby-myth.html
Apparently in the original myth it may have been cranes. Interesting.
On a related note, I was pondering the other day “what do I do with this anxiety?”, and something made me look to the left, and there was a car with “Adventure” written on the license plate. That would be much easier to chalk up to an unconscious perception, but I liked it anyway.
So I guess with fear the task is transformation. Fear can be used to live a better life, by turning it into an interesting challenge, and emotional stimulation.
For now I am going to continue to work on calming down, on building a work/life balance that I have really never had, on relaxing more without my reliable state management system, and on being less obsessive generally.
It’s slow, very slow. But it’s movement in the right direction. That’s the best I can manage for now. It’s something, and something good.