Anxiety
We celebrate winter holidays in the way that we populate our Instagram feeds, showing only the warm, bright, and jolly sides of ourselves, and anyone who displays an emotion that is less than cheery is castigated as a grinch or a scrooge. In contrast to these expectations, I am beginning this new season of Stories of Emotional Granularity with an exploration of anxiety.
This week, we will be talking about anxiety, because anxiety is real. Anxiety is equally as true as happiness. Anxiety is inescapable. Anxiety does not go away if we stop talking about it. What’s more, in our time, anxiety is growing. It is spreading like the darkness of winter. I can’t put it more simply than this: Something feels wrong. Guests in this episode include anthropologist Richard Currier, an accountant named Laura, ayahuasca guide Jonathan Schwartz, entrepreneur Adam Baruh, and researcher Kristen Donnelly.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that celebrates the diversity of emotional experience. The podcast began this spring, and this week’s episode marks the beginning of its third season.
I want to open up this season with some honesty about emotion in some ways that aren’t very light and bright, because it’s December now, and this is the season of darkness.
I know a lot of people don’t talk about it that way. They say it’s a season of joy. They make winter sound all holly and jolly, and they repeat that message over and over again. They repeat their declarations of happiness with such insistence that it’s difficult not to think that they’re trying to compensate for something they’d rather not think about.
It’s winter. It’s cold. The light doesn’t last for very long, and even when the sun is up, it’s low in the sky. The trees are bare and skeletal. The flowers are withered and brown and fallen to the ground and dead. So much of the world is dead in winter.
More often than not, when we say “Happy new year” to the people we meet, we do so with an unspoken understanding that we’re really hoping that next year will be better than the last one was. We greet the new year in the way that we greet a new day, having had the chance for a bit of rest because what we’ve been through the last time around had us feeling depleted, worn out.
It's a violation of our cultural norms to acknowledge our feelings of darkness. We’re not supposed to admit it when we’re feeling down. Instead, we are supposed to pretend to always be feeling warm and light. So, we desperately put up lights all over our homes, inside and outside, to make it seem like we have kept the darkness at bay. We tell stories and sing songs about feeling cozy and comfortable, as if our toes are not cold.
We celebrate winter holidays in the way that we populate our Instagram feeds, showing only the warm, bright, and jolly sides of ourselves, and anyone who displays an emotion that is less than cheery is castigated as a grinch or a scrooge, an enemy of the happiness cult who must be heckled and harassed until they display the socially required level of joy.
In contrast to these expectations, I am beginning this new season of Stories of Emotional Granularity with an exploration of anxiety.
Why am I going to this length to talk about our darker feelings? Why can’t I just keep it light? What makes it so important to talk about the diversity of emotion?
My motivation in creating this podcast is to stand against those ideologies, whether they come from Silicon Valley or the North Pole, that attempt to reduce the richness of subjective human experience into a drastically limited list of emotions approved for public display and analysis.
This week, we will be talking about anxiety, because anxiety is real. Anxiety is equally as true as happiness. Anxiety is inescapable. Anxiety does not go away if we stop talking about it.
What’s more, in our time, anxiety is growing. It is spreading like the darkness of winter.
I can’t put it more simply than this: Something feels wrong.
Chances are you know this already. You feel it.
Practically speaking, many things are better than they ever have been. Our engines of economic production have never been so efficient. Our science has never been as advanced as it is now. Our technology has never been more sophisticated.
Nonetheless, something feels deeply wrong.
The problem is that our emotions don’t match objective reality. This distinction is what makes our emotions so important to understand. They are removed from the external, measurable world and yet, they are at the very core of our experience of life.
Emotion is the tone of the subjective experience of consciousness. Emotions are neither correct nor incorrect. They simply are what they are. They are the essence of our individual perspectives.
Human society, however, is increasingly immense and depersonalized. As we perceive the scope of global humanity, we struggle to identify our relevance within it. The problems that impact our lives have individual consequences, but as individuals, we lack the power to fully confront those problems.
We feel a gap between the way that we feel and how it seems that things should feel. We feel anxious. That feeling, anxiety, is the subject of this episode.
It seems as if we are living in a time of particularly heightened anxiety. We have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, but most people remain more isolated than they were before. Climate change is altering our sense of security in the world outside our doors. Around the world, authoritarian leaders are threatening to dismantle the freedoms that previous generations struggled to obtain. Technological advances are taking place at a pace that seems to have escaped our control, provoking the development of a new emotion that is focused specifically on the dangers created by artificial intelligence. They call it “AI anxiety”.
When I spoke with anthropologist Richard Currier, author of the book Unbound, our conversation began with the feeling of anxiety that seems to pervade our lives.
Richard Currier:
Since I finished Unbound, I started another book, specifically on that subject. And my next book, which I'm working on right now, is called Unnatural: How modern society is destroying human happiness, and the thesis of the book is that in spite of unprecedented longevity or average longevity, in spite of an abundance of food, clothing and shelter, in spite of an abundance of transportation and communication, and all the other benefits of modern society that we are familiar with, people in modern society seem to have higher levels of depression, anxiety, self-doubt, and all the things that go with it, than people in smaller scale pre-industrial societies.
Jonathan Cook:
Authors like Steven Pinker cite statistics to argue that, on the whole, life is objectively better for people on average than it used to be. Richard Currier, however, has engaged in a cross-cultural comparison of the subjective experience of humanity and observed an increase in the occurrence and intensity of anxiety in our global digital-industrial society.
Richard Currier:
You find a lot of misery, a lot more misery than you find among hunters and gatherers, although it is not the case that people in hunting and gathering societies were always happy. They suffered from disease, from injuries, from premature death, from. A lot of it from tribal warfare. So, there were certainly miseries in those societies. But aside from the occasional death and tribal war and disease that may have swept through those societies, the rest of the time, they seem rather content, at peace with themselves, at peace with nature, and I think that one of the most difficult problems that modern humans face is that they're cut off from the environment in which humans evolved. If you took the fish and put it in a bucket, they wouldn't be happy. If you took a bird and kept it in a cage all day long where it couldn't fly, it wouldn't be happy. If you took a lion or a tiger and put them in a zoo, they're not. Similarly, when you take Homo sapiens out of the environment in which it evolved for over a million years of open grasslands, wetlands, streams, rivers, lakes, oceans. And you put it in a, it's concrete and steel urban environment with minimal views of trees, maybe no trees at all with artificial lighting that obscures the rising and setting of the sun. With centralized heating that eliminates the fires that humans built and lived by 4 million years. You're taking an animal out of its natural environment and putting it in an artificial environment that is not harmonized with its DNA.
Taking this approach of traditional anthropology and turning it on to our own society, my new book has a chapter on food, a chapter on sleep, a chapter on communication, all these basic fundamental aspects of human life, and instead of focusing on just one dimension of human lives. It looks at all the dimensions and the interplay among them. If you look at these basic dimensions of human life, you find that in modern society, they’re very, very unnatural. Our food is unnatural. Our sleep is unnatural. Our childhood is a natural. We put our children in closed rooms and make them sit in a seat for hours that at times this is completely horrifying to hunters and gatherers. Their children roam free from birth until almost adulthood.
We've produced a population of humans that is used to confinement, is used to being under supervision, plus the advent of electric lighting means that people no longer go to sleep when the sun sets. The lack of normal sleep is one of the hallmarks of modern society and has all kinds of deleterious physical and mental and emotional effects on the population of modern society. It creates a sensation of ill health. People wake up and they don't feel refreshed. They feel drowsy and weak. It creates a sensation of solitude. People do not feel as connected as they do when they have proper sleep.
Jonathan Cook:
Richard ascribes the pervasive anxiety of our time to a discrepancy between the social setting of our civilized lives and the natural settings to which we are biologically adapted. Much of our anxiety, from this point of view, is the consequence of a gap between our instinctive expectations and the social expectations to which we must conform.
Whether digital-industrial society has actually worsened the anxiety that people typically feel is difficult to objectively measure, given that we can’t go back in time to compare perceptions of anxiety as they changed with the advent of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. At the very least, however, it’s clear that people are feeling anxiety about the perceived growth in anxiety.
In the 20th century, mental health professionals created the cultural concept of anxiety disorder as an illness of the mind. However, some amount of anxiety, in the right context, can be viewed as part of a healthy emotional life.
Anxiety can be defined as an anticipation of negative events, and so, in the right amount, feeling anxious can help us focus and motivate us to plan ahead.
Laura is an accountant. As such, she helps businesses confront the uncertainty of the future by planning expenses and tracking liabilities. Nonetheless, Laura is struggling with anxiety over her own professional future. Throughout the year, she has watched the financial foundations of the startup that employs her progressively weaken. At present, the company is on the verge of complete collapse.
Laura:
My name is Laura, and I am a finance professional who currently works at a startup. I would say the last few months have been pretty anxiety-inducing because the future of the company is so unknown at this point. It still is unknown at this point, even though it really feels like it's basically ending. So, this is not as much a story of past anxiety, but dealing with a present anxiety. It's almost real-time storytelling of an experience with this emotion that I try to suppress at times, because who wants to be anxious? It's not fun. Anxiety creates a lot of physiological changes in my body, where I get nauseous or have intense cravings for unhealthy foods, and it makes me want to pace in circles. Sometimes, I have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or I want to sleep too much, and then, there's a lot of avoidance. So, there's all kinds of actions that play with this emotion.
So anyway, the place I work currently was, is running out of money and I am expecting to lose my job, yesterday, maybe in an hour or two, and the unknown creates a strong sense of anxiety. I don't know what my next job will be. I don't know what direction I'm necessarily going in, and it's scary. The society we're in right now, the safety nets are not strong enough for people, and so, there is this sense of just such anxiety. I feel like anxiety is a huge issue everywhere and it's people just seem to be suffering from it and need all kinds of drugs to calm themselves.
I'm trying to find methods to manage the anxiety by taking walks. And I would love to meditate, but I can't seem to clear my head enough because it's consumed with the unknown.
Jonathan Cook:
Even as she is consumed by anxiety about Laura’s individual career, she perceives the larger context of growing anxiety throughout society described by Richard Currier. It isn’t just her own job. Reliable connections seem to be weakening more broadly. Life has always involved some struggle, but Laura has noticed the way that social safety nets that gave people some reassurance in generations past have grown threadbare. Now, if people fall, there’s little trust that anything will be there to catch them, or even to slow down their descent into utter ruin.
Anxiety, as Richard and Laura describe it, is more subtle than simple fear. Anxiety is the feeling of a growing threat that may not have yet reached the threshold of immediate danger, but could erupt at any moment into a full and open crisis. Laura has seen the signs of her company’s coming collapse, and yet, she can’t tell when the company will actually close down. There are rumors of potential new investors who could come to the rescue, though such stories seem increasingly implausible. So, she continues to go to work, expecting every day to receive a phone call or an email notifying her that her job no longer exists.
And then what?
Anxiety is often far from an idle concern. As with the crisis Laura is facing, we have much to lose.
Laura:
We have responsibilities as adults to take care of ourselves and our children and our families and not knowing where my next paycheck will be coming from creates a sense of there's a cliff that I see in the future, and once I'm out of money, then what? I mean, it's very possible I get a job offer in a week, and I'm worried about nothing.
I'm an accountant. I'm a certified public accountant. I have 20 years’ experience, and I feel like I do a very good job and I can accomplish what a lot of places will need. So, I have a level of confidence that I will find work, but I don't know if it's going to be the right fit for me and that unknown of who I'm going to be working with and if I feel comfortable in an organization and if there's the right balance of work life and flexibility. I mean, I've worked for a few, well, I've worked for one particularly horrible person, so I know that that's a potential as well, to have a boss who just is terrible. Then, will I be able to just leave? it's hard to know what you're walking into before you get there. So there, that just creates a sense of anxiety that I try to think my way out of. I try to push the anxious thoughts away and keep optimistic thoughts in the front of my head so that I see hope with this change rather than fear.
Jonathan Cook:
As an accountant, Laura keeps track of expenses as well as income. It’s her job to confront the imbalances between growth and loss, and to use the power of her mind to bring the two back into accord.
There is a limit, however, to how much Laura can foresee, and how much she can control.
Anxiety is an anticipation of change. It’s a fear of what may be to come as we move into the future. Laura manages her apprehensive feelings about her professional future by reconnecting her mind with her body, exercising her will with a discipline of regular, measured movement forward. To deal with her anxiety, she walks.
Laura:
I feel very restless. Walking kind of combats that restlessness because you're moving, so you can clear your mind by focusing on your surroundings. Maybe it's not really clearing your mind, but it brings you to the present. So much anxiety stems from not being in the present. So, the more time you can spend actually appreciating where you are at that point in time, I think helps combat the anxiety of the unknowns in the future.
Most of us don't really need to be anxious, but yet, it's a growing problem among people in our country. I just hear a lot about kids with anxiety all the time and like, why does a ten year-old have to be anxious? What do they have to be anxious about? Whereas an adult who's taking care of that ten year-old, on the other hand, might have more reason to be anxious because they need to provide for the child. But staying present and focusing on each day is something that helps.
I think the way that we live today, though, it's hard to avoid looking forward and trying to plan ahead because we're all in debt and you need to plan for that debt. We have these homes that are all mortgaged, so it's not like you can stop paying if you run out of money temporarily and people quickly lose everything, or can. I guess that's where the anxiety starts to come into play, and you start thinking about all you can lose. I guess the more you have, the more you can lose. So, simplicity probably helps keep anxiety at bay as well, and walking keeps it simple. It's a simple activity. It requires just a good pair of shoes and the right clothing so that you're not cold.
Jonathan Cook:
Anxiety, as Laura describes it, is about her relationship with time. It is an emotion that she experiences as a consequence of her movement out of the past and into the future. She copes with her anxiety by paying more attention to what she has to work with in the present moment. Anxious about her future, she attempts to keep her burdens light in the present by letting go of her attachments, making her life more simple.
Laura:
I think the simpler you live, the less you have to worry about. So, anxiety is about worry and brains racing in directions that are theorizing what could happen and if what could happen. If those choices are more narrow, there's less to worry about. If you have so much stuff, then there's that much to lose. If you don't have that much, then you have less to maintain and there's less to worry about. It’s about finding a balance. With anxiety, there's a balance there, too of, I mean, you don't want to not worry about the future because then you might just be stagnant.
Jonathan Cook:
The trouble with our strategies for coping with anxiety is that we can never be certain that they’re going to be enough. Anxiety, after all, is an apprehension of things that might occur, or worry about the reactions we might have to events we are anticipating. Unpredictability is an inherent part of the context of anxiety.
Once we start to feel anxiety, it can lead to an expanding feeling of unpredictability. Anxiety has a certain skeptical quality to it, with a willingness to call our assumptions about reality into question. Once we begin to question the beliefs that make us feel secure, it can be difficult to regain any sense of lasting security. Anxiety can even lead us to question the actions we have taken in order to deal with our anxieties. Anxiety puts us on guard against trouble ahead, and once we put that guard up, it can be difficult to put it back down.
Laura:
When there's so much negative energy in something and so much anxiety preparing for something, it's hard to feel good, to imagine even feeling good about a dramatic change, because you have this like all of a sudden everything's okay, but because you were prepared for it not to be okay, and that was the overwhelming feeling. That fear doesn't go away, that feeling of like, well, this could just fall apart at any minute, it can't just go. It's like a friend of mine who was in a relationship with a woman and they broke up because there was an imbalance in how they were feeling about each other. Two months later, she decides to try again. He was always worried that she was not going to feel the same way, and it's that you can't, once that fear, and the fear of future disappointment, it just sits there. It exists. So, it almost because of the negativity that existed initially, there's really no way to shed it. It just becomes part of the future experience
Jonathan Cook:
Even when Laura’s friend got back the romantic relationship he wanted, it didn’t feel right, because he could never again feel confident that the relationship was on secure footing. In this sense, anxiety is the opposite of trust. It’s an insecure feeling of attachment, a suspicion that nothing good endures, a feeling that our lives can be cast into chaos at any moment.
It’s an odd thing, but the agonizing worries of anxiety can sometimes be cast as a sign of something we’re looking forward to. Laura explains,
Laura:
I see that as, 'Oh, I'm anxious to see you,' where it's excitement. So how to translate how sometimes anxiety translates into excitement, I mean, it's exciting too in a sense of the unknown. There's some excitement involved with what the future will bring. When I'm feeling optimistic about it, when I'm feeling like ready for the next step, which I have been, but I've been waiting to receive the official confirmation that the next step is here, and that has caused major waves of anxiety. I haven't been feeling excited by the conversation that I am expecting to have today just because it never feels good to have a door close. I don't know if that's true either. Maybe it's just a door that I've enjoyed where I've been in the last year and change, and I find it sad and disappointing that the next phase of this company doesn't include me, or at least I'm 98.5%. Sure, it doesn't include me. That percentage keeps changing, but I'm pretty confident that the next stage doesn't include me.
Jonathan Cook:
Anxiety can be exhausting, but it also can be exciting. Anxiety carries within it a sense of possibility for unexpected things to happen, which could be good or bad. So, as Laura indicates, we can refer to ourselves as anxious when we are eagerly anticipating a future event.
Even in these cases, however, what we’re really trying to say is that we’re looking forward to something happening, and because it’s so important to us, we’re afraid that it won’t take place. Anxiety, in this way, can become a marker for what matters. Sometimes we can feel that if we’re not anxious about something, we must not care about it that much.
It’s a funny twist, but sometimes anxiety itself can operate like a handhold of security in an insecure situation. We can become so used to our anxiety that we begin to feel that our anxiety itself is keeping us safe. We can interpret anxiety as a sign that we are taking a problem seriously, and that our anxiety will prevent us from losing focus on solving the problem.
In this sense, we can become attached to our anxiety. This reaction can set up a cycle of anxiety breeding more anxiety. This method of coping can work for a while, but it requires an immense amount of emotional investment to maintain, and so, eventually, it begins to break down. That’s what happened to Adam Baruh.
Adam Baruh:
I'm Adam Baruh. I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur. For the last six years, I've been running a consulting agency called SuiteCentric, which is a NetSuite solution provider and implementer. My career over the last seventeen years has really been kind of focused around the NetSuite platform. Then in 2021, kind of following a very kind of personal self-awareness and discovery that was dealing with a lot of anxiety and some mental health issues, and just running my company and the stress and anxiety behind that, I kind of had a journey of self-discovery and got into, out of that kind of manifested a podcast that I started hosting called The Change, which is about servant leadership and mental health in business.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam Baruh was professionally successful. He was highly functional, but his functioning was based upon a constant churn of anxiety that he used to discipline himself, forcing himself into work long hours in an effort to keep his troubles at bay. His anxious professional drive wasn’t sustainable, however. It became obsessive, and his anxieties began to interfere with his ability to get through his normal daily routines.
Adam’s anxious work habits finally broke down under the additional pressure of becoming a father.
Adam Baruh:
I definitely was noticing it yesterday. It was coming from absolutely a lack of sleep because my little guy, this little cute little three-and-a-half-year-old who I love, just rolled in at 5:45 and was like, "Hey, let's go. I'm ready. You guys ready?" I was working until like 12:30 the night before, so I, rolled in here to work yesterday on five hours sleep and just felt anxious. What does that look like? I mean, for me, it manifests actually in some nervous tickiness, grinding my teeth. Everything was pissing me off yesterday morning. Everything was pissing me off.
Jonathan Cook:
When anxiety begins to cause problems, it’s often because of a heightened sensitivity to stress. This sensitivity can have its origins in traumatic experiences earlier in life. Unresolved trauma can lower the threshold for response to stress, resulting in anxiety that seems out-of-proportion to its triggers.
Adam explains how his own patterns of elevated anxiety as an adult have roots that reach back to an experience he had forty years ago.
Adam Baruh:
I’m an open book, and I like to share this very kind of painful story of my life, because I think in doing so, especially as a man, especially as a man who is almost fifty and especially as a man who's a CEO and kind of a business person, I think it's very important to talk about these things. It's related to trauma and nervous system issues and anxiety and mental health. So really, what happened was about six months before the pandemic, I started suffering these, it started where it was somewhat infrequent, but I was getting really bad anxiety attacks, which I had never had my entire life. Like, I've had some claustrophobia, but it wasn't really ever like where I would get like an amygdala hijack my nervous system, the fight-or-flight response was just in full effect, right?
So, and it was getting worse and worse. Like, like to the point where I was just really in a dark place. I couldn't even see how I was going to get out of it. You know, my little guy, who's three and a half now, was a newborn and waking up like seven times a night. I tried to help out with my wife, so it wasn't all on her. And so, I was also working about 70 to 80 hours a week just trying to keep my company afloat and financially doing well. You know, there's a lot of pressure as the CEO to just you know, it all falls on me at the end of the day, to just do everything I can to ensure that my company is going to be successful. I was probably just, you know, the lack of sleep that I was suffering, the work, the stress, the everything that I was kind of dealing with, I had some legal matters through my company that I was dealing with, which was very stressful and now I'm having these anxiety attacks, and I couldn't even, like, go to sleep without having one. To describe them, it's a claustrophobic anxiety attack.
I remember one time I went up to a client's office up in LA and I was having a one-on-one meeting with this guy. He set us up in the conference, this gigantic, huge conference room, but it was like in the center of their building, so it had no windows. It's just me and him in there. I swear to god, it was a basketball court size conference room. It was huge, but there's no windows, and early in our discussions, all of a sudden, this thought entered my mind of feeling trapped. Then the anxiety attack came in. I had to excuse myself go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, try to like come back to reality, which fortunately, I was able to do.
Adam Baruh:
When I was six years old, my parents were fresh off their divorce, and my mom would have this babysitter come over, this teenage boy. He would come over, and as soon as my mom left, this guy would lock me in my mom's walk-in closet, barricade the door, and the light switch was on the outside of the closet, shut off the light. So it's pitch black dark in there. I could right now, I could feel the terror. I could remember that terror that I had of being locked in that closet.
Well, now here I am as a 46 year-old, having claustrophobic anxiety attacks. My nervous system, the seeds were planted in that experience for what resulted then, forty years later, in these claustrophobic anxiety attacks. Where the shame came from was one of the times that I finally was let out of the closet, this kid had invited a bunch of his little teenage friends over and they would they would party while it was locked in the closet and be doing pretty hardcore drugs and stuff like that. I remember as a six year-old finally being let out of the closet and seeing these kids passed out with needles around rubber hoses around their arms, as a six year-old. Right? Then anyways, one of the times I was let out and I was molested. So, that's where the shame came from.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam’s experience shows how the feeling of anxiety can exist at multiple levels simultaneously. Behind the immediate anxiety that we feel are patterns of anxiety that we’ve learned in the past. What we feel in the present relates to our present problems, but also to the troubling times we’ve had in the past. Our past experiences of anxiety work as analogies for the challenges we face now, and we react accordingly.
Jonathan Schwartz manages ayahuasca retreats for people who are trying to resolve patterns of anxiety in their lives. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that anxiety remains a part of his own struggle. Anxiety, he suggests, is a consequence of the uncertainty of the future. His anxiety coexists with the belief that everything is going to be okay.
Jonathan Schwartz:
I wish I could say that I don't have any attachments and that I can live in the present moment all the time, and that I master, master, this big physical world. But I haven't. I'm a student, and I'm learning. It makes me feel better, you know, when. When situations arise. When things come up that might be really stressful, causing me to be have lots of high anxiety. It feels better to know that everything is going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay. Just letting it go. It's much calmer. Less anxious feeling.
I think Buddha said anxiety is like living in the future. Anxiety roots from living in the future, depression routes from living in the past. Something like that, nd that's that. I think that resonates with me: Worry, anxiety about what might happen.
Jonathan Cook:
The trick with anxiety is that it’s difficult to tell if it’s accurate. Anxiety is the consequence of one kind of model of reality that our brains construct, and our brains do so for good reason. Our anxieties can protect us from real dangers. Sometimes, anxiety is an accurate response to threats that actually exist in the world.
At other times, however, our minds can imagine causes for anxiety that don’t really exist. At other times, we can amplify a source of anxiety far beyond its actual scale.
How can we tell the difference? How can we know when our anxiety is justified, and when it’s out of touch?
Sometimes our minds concoct an anxious interpretation of reality out of thin scraps of information, trying to put what we know into a pattern that can guide our behavior. We fill in the gaps of what we know with what we expect to be there. Sometimes, we make a good guess, but other times we just get it wrong.
The ambiguity in our perception of patterns can be particularly troubling in the context of relationships with other people, when we can interpret, reinterpret, and misinterpret the smallest details of words and actions.
Kristen Donnelly, a business owner and researcher at Abbey Research, feels this kind of anxiety when she begins to think that a friend has ghosted her.
Kristen Donnelly:
I get really anxious and it depends on what I'm out of touch, and if I'm out of touch with a friend, I get really anxious that they've ghosted be that I did something to hurt them, that I've done something wrong, that I've caused trauma in some way, and that's why they're not speaking to me. That's why they're not texting me back. If it's professional, I just know I get anxious that I can't answer questions about it or I can't make decisions that are informed on it, based on other things.
I'm very lucky that the two women I work the most closely with know that about me. And so, we have constructed a world in which I can tap, I can touch base at any point in time and ask where we are on something, and they'll have an answer for me within an hour, and I know and they never get defensive. They know I'm not micromanaging. They know I just, for my own anxiety, need to know where things are because I'm always moving pieces in my brain between the multiple divisions and that I need to divide my time with and then my outside of work commitments.
My brain is a constantly, it's like a jigsaw puzzle made of Jello. It's constantly shifting and moving, and so sometimes I need to know which pieces are settled and so that I can make plans around others. I don't like micromanaging. I don't care enough about look, I don't care. I don't hire people I have to micromanage. That's stressful. If I had to micromanage you, you would be at another location. It's just not my gig. So, if I'm checking in with you, it's because it's for my own needs, not because I don't trust you to do what's happening. So, for me, so much of my life is about controlling my anxiety and mitigating my anxiety, which I've had a clinical diagnosis for since I was eighteen. So we're going on, I'm turning forty in a couple of weeks, in a couple of months. It's been all of my adult life has been spent being clinically, clinically anxious.
Jonathan Cook:
Kristen identifies a simple yet effective technique for coping with anxiety. Because anxiety is an emotion that we feel in response to gaps in our knowledge about what is and what might be, our anxieties can be allayed by efforts to obtain information to fill those gaps.
Sometimes, anxiety can feel like an answer, a response to a question. How do we feel? We feel anxious. It can also be helpful to consider anxiety as a question: What is happening? Is it going to be okay?
These questions can be answered, replacing anxiety with a better understanding of the situation we’re in. Of course, knowledge is never complete, but by interacting with our anxiety as if it is a question, we can place ourselves in a position where it’s possible to confront our problems with a greater resolution.
Adam Baruh tries to take this approach to dealing with anxiety when he interacts with his employees.
Adam Baruh:
Where emotional intelligence and emotions became important is to really get to a place to try to understand every everybody on my team's anxieties, what they're worried about in their own personal lives, because we were all challenged that way. Nobody knew early in the pandemic when the pandemic would end. Was my company going to go out of business? Were my customers going to go out of business? Were we going to be locked in our houses forever? Were the playgrounds going to be closed forever? Nobody knew. I found it to be very much a requirement in my role as a leader in my business to try to understand and check in with everybody and just see how everybody's doing. So that that was a very direct relationship between how important it is to have emotional intelligence and business.
It's okay. It's okay to feel anxious right now. Given all that you've got on your plate right now, you're actually doing a great job. You're dedicated to your family. You're dedicated on this mission of healing for yourself and trying to heal others. So, you know, like, kick ass dude, like, you're a badass.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam’s experience suggests that instead of expecting people to come to work without anxiety, or asking them to suppress it while they’re on the clock, an empathetic business owner could gain by actively engaging with workers’ anxieties, trying to get to the bottom of the source of what’s making them feel anxious in the first place.
Kristen Donnelly puts it in another way: Anxiety, when approached in the right way, can become a superpower.
Kristen Donnelly:
Everything that is wrong with us is a superpower, if used appropriately. Like if is so much of the problems, is that the things that really plague us, our villain, our villain origin stories are that things got out of balance. It's why I talk about stasis so much is that I want things to be, you know, I want to have a controlled wobble instead of in off control wobble. I don't believe in solidification of anything, but stasis is a good is a good sense of physical balance. So, for me, I don't have ADD. I don't have ADHD. I have generalized anxiety disorder with occasional depression. And so what that looks like for me is that I because my brain is always working, my brain works fast all the time. I'm a really quick problem solver. One of the reasons I'm an excellent public speaker is that I think really quick on my feet so I can answer any question. I can. I'm very adaptable because anxiety means that I have already mentally prepared for all the outcomes that I can think of. And so you can't throw anything at me in the moment to freak me out. I also, because of anxiety, have a really good memory, and so I catalog everything I've experienced quite a bit, which means that there's not a lot that I can't like, identify with in the moment.
Jonathan Cook:
Anxiety doesn’t always feel pleasant, but as Kristen observes, there can be an upside to anxiety. Jonathan Schwartz agrees with this idea.
Jonathan Schwartz:
There’s a lot of upside, I think, to that. It keeps you on your toes, because there was a period of there's been some periods in my life where I don't feel any anxiety. I'm totally relaxed about everything, and I think that's when I miss some details, oftentimes too relaxed about things. So, the upside of anxiety is like it helps you to get your work done. Usually as long as you can manage it helps you get work done and kind of check details.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonathan and Kristen demonstrate, in their reflections about the beneficial aspects of anxiety, why it’s important to bring darker emotions out into the open. They have taken different paths, Kristen through research and Jonathan through ayahuasca, but they have both turned toward their anxiety to look it in the face. Adam has done something similar by confronting the abuse in his childhood. Laura too has been facing her anxieties about work through her accounting skills, responding to the uncertainty of her employer’s future by looking for more information and constructing a realistic model of how long the company can survive. As a result, she was able to begin looking for other professional opportunities before the crisis arrived. She found temporary work for a few weeks while interviewing for other positions, and as of just a few hours before I edited this podcast episode together, Laura was offered and accepted a job with a real estate firm. She is going to be able to pay the bills and take care of her kids.
Anxiety is an emotional alarm system. It demands our attention. It calls upon us to look at our problems rather than remaining in denial about them. As such, anxiety can help us to do what needs to be done, to confront the difficult, unhappy problems that are liable to accumulate in any life.
Sometimes, anxiety gets out of hand. Sometimes, anxiety raises an alarm when an alarm is not really called for. The thing is, we can’t know the difference if we don’t listen to the voice of anxiety and bring our attention to the concerns that it brings to mind. We can’t trust the voice of anxiety in our minds all the time, but we can pay it heed and critically examine the anxious claims it makes.
Perhaps we shouldn’t trust any emotion completely. Emotions motivate our actions, but they are subjective. That doesn’t mean that they’re always wrong, but it does mean that the stories our emotions tell us about reality are merely models of reality. They are narratives built from bits of information and filtered through our experiences. Each emotion argues its case, and it’s up to us to act as the judge of whether its case is coherent and substantiated. None of us can be completely objective, of course, but by paying attention to our emotions we can learn to recognize the patterns in when certain feelings tend to be accurate, and when they tend to not lead us in a useful direction.
This kind of critical examination of our emotions should not be reserved only for our darkest feelings. We should be skeptical of our pleasures as well as our suffering. In a season where we are expected to engage in performances of cheer, we should ask ourselves, as honestly as we can, whether the cheer is really justified. What parts of reality are the holly jolly messages concealing?
To this end, next week’s episode will explore the popular, yet generally unexamined, emotion of happiness. There is more to happiness than just a smiling face.