“Anxiety is the first reflex of possibility, a glimpse, and yet a terrible sorcery.”
- Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers
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I’ll never forget the first time it happened to me. I was sitting in a small lecture room at IUPUI, during the first semester of graduate school. A group of us, no more than 10, were waiting on our professor to arrive. I was sitting on the right-hand side of the table, trying to carry on a conversation with one of my colleagues. As we were waiting, the volume of everyone’s conversations grew and grew, with voices scattering and crossing over one another. The cacophonous roar of sound began to infiltrate my brain. My heart began to beat loudly; I could feel it in my ears. My hands started to tremble and my stomach felt like a black hole inside my torso. My breathing quickened and I felt like I was going to pass out. In an attempt at a reprieve, I leapt out of the chair and ran towards the hallway, where I crashed into a small office chair. My professor walked by at that moment, recognizing my terror. She asked if I was ok. I was honest and told her I wasn’t sure and would need a couple of minutes to regroup. I took those moments to collect myself, calm down, and then made my way back into the classroom.
This was the first time I had a panic attack. My doctor would confirm as much about a month later when I told her about the episode. She prescribed me Lexapro, or Escitalopram, an antidepressant and anxiety control medication. I’ve been on it ever since, but I still live with basic, constant symptoms of dread. I feel it most in my stomach, especially if something happens like a phone call, an unexpected email, or impending social function. Even standing here right now is not the easiest thing on the planet; it takes a lot of preparation to speak for you.
Anxiety is a concept that is nearly universally experienced but almost universally misunderstood. It is not plain nervousness, like when you stop abruptly at a stop light or surprisingly run into an ex-partner or an in-law. For me and many others, it is a constant, pervasive dread that permeates our very existence. A couple of years ago I realized that my anxiety was beginning to affect nearly every aspect of my life, from work and relationships to even my ability to sleep at night. It was here that I began my own investigations into anxiety, reading and studying as much as I could on the subject. From learning about Buddhism to Psychoanalysis and everything in between, I really didn’t crack the “anxiety code” until I discovered a nineteenth century philosopher who wrote a pioneering book on the subject in 1844.
So, think of this as a summation of what I’ve learned and found useful, akin to a “case history” of sorts that could’ve been written by the late neurologist and constant inspiration to me, Dr. Oliver Sacks. Sacks wrote amazing books about a myriad of psychological conditions, from Parkinson’s disease to hallucinations. His book, Awakenings, inspired the classic film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Sacks’s stories always blended superb intellectual analysis with an intimate and empathetic view of his subjects. I will attempt to do the same with my own life, sharing what I’ve learned and what helps me. In the end, I hope you take something away from it that helps you with your own struggles, whether you have constant anxiety like me or you have occasional bouts of nervousness.
Growing up, I was always a nervous kid, biting my nails down to the quick and afraid of scary movies. But my anxiety as a generalized phenomenon really started in college when I had my first job. Working retail at a mall bookstore during my years at IU Kokomo taught me so much about what made me completely nervous. The constant rejection and frustration that comes with having to perform emotional labor for customers was very hard on me. It also didn’t help that I had a thoughtful but overbearing boss who was too interested in my personal life. I think those were the years that I developed my generalized anxiety, as I’ve never felt the same since. Graduate school, marriage, and now my permanent career have added to this anxiety, almost bringing me to the breaking point a number of times. Yet, I have persevered and even succeeded. Was it sheer will that kept me going, or something else?
In The Problem of Anxiety (1926), Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, speculates that anxiety might be tied to the initial trauma of birth. As he writes, “anxiety, in the human being, takes the birth process as its prototype.” More broadly, however, Freud acknowledges the complications arising from attempting to confirm this hypothesis, so he then breaks anxiety down into two major components, “one, inappropriate and inexpedient, in response to the new situation of danger; the other, a useful one, as a means of giving warning of and averting such a situation.” As with the birth hypothesis, Freud finds difficulty in nailing down exactly what these “dangers” may be. While the birth trauma may comprise one of the dangers causing anxiety, other dangers from early life may present themselves which are wholly different. Regardless of the causes, as philosopher Gordon Marino has remarked, psychoanalysis seeks to “uncover those initial experiences and learn that while it might have been reasonable to feel anxious about being angry as a child, it is no longer appropriate. For Freud, anxiety is not just a surge of chemicals; it is a capsulized version of experience, a piece of intimate knowledge about the self.” Freud’s ideas only provided one piece of the puzzle regarding my anxiety; for the next stage of my research I turned to a completely different form of analysis: Buddhism.
I have been interested in Buddhism for many years and have recently become more involved in the New Kadampa tradition of meditation and study. Founded by the Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, called “Geshe-la” by his followers, the New Kadampa tradition focuses on the practical application of Buddhism to everyday life, especially in regards to stress and anxiety. I recently attended a Kadampa meditation workshop that focused on the problem of anxiety and stress. Our afternoon teacher, Kathy, said something that profoundly informed my thinking. She said, “Anxiety points to where our attachments lie.” Thus, if we can learn what these attachments are through a practice of meditation, it will help us work towards our happiness. Geshe-la reflects on the renunciation of material attachments in his wonderful book, How to Transform Your Life. “We need to reduce our attachment to worldly pleasures by realizing that they are deceptive and cannot give real satisfaction. In reality, they cause us only suffering,” he writes. I know that a big part of my own anxiety was tied to my obsession with stuff. I would say to myself, “If I only had this one item or one relationship I would be happy.” This causes so much anxiety in our lives, because the expectation of the stuff almost never matches the reality of it. Alleviating some of our anxiety comes from an internal practice of letting go of our unnecessary attachments, both physical and mental.
While all of these insights were valuable to my understanding of anxiety, a substantial change in my view came with the discovery of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Born in Denmark in 1813, Kierkegaard lived nearly all of his life in his hometown of Copenhagen, leaving only a few times during his short life. Baptised in the Lutheran Church and taught by learned philosophers and theologians, he would develop a view of Christianity, psychology, and philosophy that was all his own. He was also heavily influenced by his failed romance with Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard was completely obsessed with Regine, only to break off their engagement in order to focus on his philosophical and theological studies. This loneliness—punctuated by an already moody disposition—heavily influenced his later writings on the nature of suffering.
Kierekgaard’s position on anxiety breaks down into four fundamental concepts: individualism, freedom, sin, and faith. As the first fundamental concept, Kierkegaard believed in the centrality of the individual in all of life, from making the smallest decisions to one’s connection to the divine. As he wrote in his 1844 masterwork, The Concept of Anxiety:
. . . the human being is individuum and, as such, at one and the same time itself and the whole human race, so that the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race.
Here Kierekegaard is making the crucial point that being an individual without any relation to the broader world is in fact not being an individual at all. The best we should hope to achieve as an individual is wrapped up not only in our relationship to ourselves but in our relationships with others, who are also pursuing their own form of individuality. When a tension arises between ourselves and others, it can create anxiety. For example, if you want one thing but your partner or friend wants something else, it can create an anxiety-ridden feeling that is only resolved through a compromise.
A person’s individuality then creates the conditions for Kierkegaard’s second component of anxiety: our experience of freedom. Being an individual implies choice— we make choices every day and some are incredibly difficult. Kierkegaard says that “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” This seems complicated, for even he calls freedom “dizzying” in a later passage, but I think it’s something we can make plain. Freedom represents our ability as individuals to contemplate all the potentials of our lives, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, and to make choices based on those thoughts. Even when everything is going right, we can still freely contemplate the worst. Like with individuality, this tension between our known possibilities and what actually happens in our lives causes anxiety. Philosopher David Roberts calls this the “condition of indeterminate potentiality.” Life can throw us curve balls despite all of our freely-thought prospects and decisions. Anxiety comes over us as a result.
This leads us to Kierkegaard’s third essential concept about anxiety: its relationship to sin. Now, “sin” is a super loaded word. It conjures the fire and brimstone preaching of Jonathan Edwards in his iconic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But Kierkegaard’s complex theological understanding of sin can be thought of in more universal ways, ways that can apply to anyone. As context, Kierkegaard believed that anxiety was a consequence of “hereditary sin,” or a state of sin that originates with Adam. However, the sin that we carry is not the sin of Adam, for Adam’s actions in the Garden of Eden created sin in humanity. As such, we carry our own personal sin but our capacity for sinfulness has its connections to Adam. As Kierkegaard explains, “It is through the first sin that sin came into the world. In exactly the same way this is true of each later person’s first sin, that through it sin comes into the world.” “Sin” in a modern reading of Kierkegaard can be defined as the potential in all human beings to engage in unethical or harmful behavior. It started with the first humans (Adam in a metaphorical sense) and continues into all of us. This potential in us creates anxiety; it is again another tension between what we’re capable of at our worst and what we do at our best.
Resolving these tensions brings us to Kierkegaard’s fourth and final component of understanding anxiety: our dedication to faith. Like with “sin,” “faith” can certainly turn off many people, especially those like myself who identify as secular humanists. Nevertheless, I think there’s a way of reading Kierkegaard that makes faith something anyone can appreciate. In the final pages of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard devotes his energies toward providing a view of faith and its relationship to anxiety. “For an individual to be formed thus absolutely and infinitely by possibility,” he writes, “that individual must be honest toward possibility and have faith. By faith, I understand here what [the philosopher Georg W. F.] Hegel somewhere, characteristically and very rightly, calls the inner certainty that anticipates infinity.” Let’s unpack this. Kierkegaard believed that faith represented an active relationship with the potentialities of not only God but of existence itself. It’s not something you just say you have; it must be something that you live. In a secular view, faith is commitment or trust— in values, ideas, and in persons. Only through a commitment to ethical values and human connections, a secular “faith”, can we ultimately resolve some of the anxiety that we experience.
So, what do I do in my everyday life that helps me live through Kierkegaard’s four components of anxiety? As regards to my own sense of self, my individuality, I try to tell myself that even though I live with anxiety, it doesn’t solely define me. I’m also someone who laughs, who loves music, who finds reading one of the greatest joys, and has fulfilling relationships. Thinking as well as acting on all the different, positive things that make up who I am helps me deal with my anxiety.
In relation to freedom, I try to be as active as possible in my life— making choices that are based on sound judgement and ethical values. One thing that has helped me work through that is talk therapy. I’ve learned that I can be impulsive and make bad decisions based on quick reactions. Therapy has taught me the value of slowing down, taking a breath, and thinking through all the possible scenarios before making a decision. This has greatly improved my life, my choices, and my feelings of anxiety.
Sin, or unethical and harmful behavior, can also be curbed through talk therapy as well as thoughtful deliberation. Sometimes I can eat too much, or stay up too late, or say hurtful things without concern for others. We all do this, we all make mistakes. We should learn from these mistakes by talking about them with our partners, family members, or friends. Writing them down in a journal also helps, as you can review it later and reflect on what worked to improve your behavior. Refining our ethical lives will also help to alleviate anxiety.
Finally, the practice of faith. Faith for me is a secular commitment to our capacities as human beings and our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world. A way to cultivate that commitment that I find especially valuable is meditation. I don’t do it every day, but when I sit down and practice, I always feel better. Even 10 seconds will make you feel better. We’re gonna try that now. Sit up straight, close your eyes, and breathe deeply, and quietly reflect for 10 seconds. Go. . . .
Now, how do you feel? I hope better, or at the very least a little less tense. Imagine doing that for 10 minutes. I try to do that as often as I can, but even I don’t always practice. Us anxious folks feel anxiety even about performing actions that might lessen our anxiety! Some kind of personal practice—meditation, prayer, yoga, exercise, whatever brings you closer to faith— should be something we all strive to do more and will help with anxiety.
In sum, anxiety is not something to try to remove from your life, to ignore or to merely treat with pills. It is something that you must embrace as a daunting, but essential component of being human. Anxiety, at its best, reminds us that we’re free and that our interaction with the world around us is constantly changing and reshaping who we are. It is better to run towards your anxiety, to live through it, than to simply reject it. In doing so, you’ll not only face your fears more courageously, but you will also learn from them emotionally, humanistically, and spiritually.
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“To suppose that anxiety is an imperfection merely betrays a straightlaced cowardice, since, to the contrary, the greatness of anxiety is the very prophet of the miracle of perfection, and inability to become anxious is a sign of one’s being either an animal or an angel, which according to the teaching of scriptures, is less perfect than being a human being."
- Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers