Wednesday 14 April 2021

Anxiety: thoughts from CBT and Existentialism

 

Anxiety Thoughts

 

What is anxiety?

Well firstly there are the symptoms that you get

1.       Body

a.       Light headed

b.       Fast breathing

c.       Heart pumping quickly

d.       Maybe wanting the loo

2.       Behaviour/Intention

a.       Manage the threat through

                                                               i.      Escape

                                                             ii.      Control

                                                           iii.      Reassurance

3.       Attention

a.       Focus on threat or escape

4.       Cognitions

a.       Past, present future threats or escapes

 

Trigger

There seems two types of trigger, one that relates to an object, one that relates to our being

Object based triggers for anxiety are the belief something will be threatening. Fear is present threat, anxiety is the experience of future threat, it might happen. The threat can relate to something you want or don’t want to happen, anxiety is the feeling that you aren’t safe.

So you might be frightened of being robbed, or of failing an exam.  With the latter your fear is you wont get something you want. Anxiety can also point to the sense something bad could happen, a sense of foreboding as you walk through woods at night, the sense that you aren’t safe as you are breaking your safety rules.

Being based triggers sees anxiety, then places anxiety on a continuum with “being anxiety” moving closer towards dread or angst.  

The triggers here to anxiety would be ones that threaten your identity, such as a partner leaves you, or you do something which is morally very contrary to the values that you have lived by or the fear of death.

That anxiety is a threat to being or  non being then it allows connects with freedom, as we are free we can change our existence, therefore our being is under threat from freedom.

This then can see decisions as a source of anxiety. Anxiety relates to freedom therefore it also relates to choice. We are free to choose, we are responsible for having chosen but we could choose anything, we are uncertain in our choice as we have limited information and we don’t know what the consequences of our choices are, nor how the world will be in which we choose.  Here is some of the tension of anxiety that we are free but responsible, free but there will be limiting factors through what happens in the world and our mortality.  

When anxiety then is triggered by freedom there is the sense that it brings us back to our human condition, free but limited, free but responsible. Anxiety then having the sense of a call back to ourselves and our existential home.  Anxiety is then the feeling that moves us from the sense of ourselves as an object to rather a process.

 

Evolutionary\physiology understanding

Anxiety is activated within the sympathetic nervous system and  prepares the body to fight\flight\freeze.  As the threat becomes actual then the anxiety can develop into anger or fear.

 

What can be helpful?

1.       See that what I’m doing is valuable and its ok to feel anxiety whilst doing it

2.       See that the threat is overstated

3.       Move my attention from the threat to something less threatening

4.       Enhance my soothing system

5.       Seeing that anxiety is a call for us back to ourselves and our existence

 

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