Anxiety is Stress Out of Place:
This story begins like all the others. Once upon a time, people lived in a certain way, and their brains were very well adapted for it…
I’ve pretty much told you everything in Vital Lies, Simple Truths in the last book, but I find that seeing how different people break the same material down into component pieces helps to show how the same principles apply to different situations. For this chapter about how perceptions and goals create intentions, I found Dr. Goleman’s version illuminating.
I’m sure something like this has happened to everyone at some point in your lives:
You anticipate something happening; you’re afraid of it happening; you try to prepare yourself for it; it happens; you have no idea what to do.
It could be anything, from being nervous about going to take your driver’s test and then suddenly forgetting how to drive and failing the test; or wanting to talk to some hot guy or chick, daydreaming about what you’d say, finally getting the chance to talk to them, and suddenly having no idea what to say; or getting ready to make a presentation, practicing it, being nervous about getting up and talking in front of all those people, then finally getting up there to give your presentation, and forgetting everything you were going to say.
In any of these cases, you’re being overcome by anxiety. Some people get anxiety attacks so badly that they have to get medicated for them. Most people just run into little things like this every once in a while.
When you suffer from anxiety, basically your mental engine slips out of ignition timing. Your consciousness turns into a wash of static, like a TV that’s suddenly disconnected from its antenna. You’re getting sensory input into your brain, but it’s triggering a bunch of conflicting thoughts all at the same time, so you can’t get figure out which ones to pay attention to.
Take the person getting up to give a speech, for instance. He knows he has to talk in front of all these people, but he doesn’t want to. He knows intellectually that he’s supposed to stand up there and say some particular words, but he feels like running away. He knows he can’t run away, so he doesn’t do that. Instead, he gets up in front of the people like he knows he has to. But he gets so overwhelmed with overcoming his feeling of wanting to run away that it ends up taking up all his consciousness, so the words he was supposed to say suddenly slip his mind.
I used the example of the person making a speech because a lot of people really hate public speaking and get nervous when they have to do it. Anxiety about public speaking doesn’t affect everybody, but anxiety about something or other affects everyone. It affects some people more that others, and it might affect some people so little that they never notice it in their lifetimes. That doesn’t mean some people are immune, it just means that some people never get pushed to their limits.
This is just another example of what happens when people get into situations their brains aren’t equipped to handle. Intellectually you know you’re supposed to do one thing, but emotionally you feel like doing a different thing. Your emotional reaction is a product of your evolution, and your intellectual reaction is the product of your learning how to act in a situation the rest of your brain isn’t designed for.
The total package of mental equipment you have to work with works pretty well most of the time. That isn’t by coincidence, because there’s no way any group of people would ever work together to create a society where everything was so strange to them that everyone felt anxious all the time. What we have instead is a living situation that works pretty well for most people most of the time. Most people end up being anxious about something at some point, and a few people end up being anxious about everything.
That majority of people who aren’t usually anxious each avoid whatever things make them anxious and focus on doing things that don’t make them anxious. Collectively they make their society function as a whole, even though everyone doesn’t participate in every part of it, and some people don’t even like some parts of it.
Those few people who get anxious about lots of things are outnumbered, so the society gets built by the other people, and then the chronically anxious people have to try to participate in that. If those chronically anxious people were the majority, they would be the ones who made the society function, so we would have a completely different society, where the chronically anxious people each participated in whatever didn’t make them anxious and avoided whatever did make them anxious. The non-anxious people would be able to participate in a lot more things than most people did, so instead of being people who kept to themselves most of the time, they would be leaders of the community. But they would only be able to lead the community so far, because there would only be so far the chronically anxious people would be willing to follow them.
For instance, in real life, a few people are anxious about driving, but most people aren’t. If most people were anxious about driving but a few people weren’t, a lot of things would be different. We wouldn’t build so many cars, and we wouldn’t sell so many cars, there wouldn’t be so many different models of cars, there wouldn’t be so many car salesmen, there wouldn’t be so many mechanics, there wouldn’t be so many roads, and there wouldn’t be so many parking lots, because most people in the society wouldn’t care about any of those things. A few people would, and some of the chronically anxious people would be willing to cooperate with those people, but they wouldn’t be willing to cooperate with them enough to make their society exactly the same as our real-life society only with a lot fewer cars.
As a result, the few non-anxious people would drive a few cars on a few roads and build their lives around that. But the whole economy and landscape of the world would be different, because with only a few cars—and trucks—cities would have to be a lot smaller, if they’d exist at all. If virtually no one dared to drive a motor vehicle, then virtually everyone would have to live close enough to their food sources to transport their food by horse—or whatever they used.
Anyway, back to anxiety in real life…
Dr. Horowitz came up with a good experiment for measuring anxiety. He had some volunteers watch one of three films. One was of the ritual circumcision of teenage Aborigines. One was of a worker in a wood shop getting into some horrific accident with a power tool. (Sorry, that’s all Dr. Goleman had to say about it, but I guess you’ve been through enough emotional trauma in this chapter.) Both of those films were very graphic and very bloody.
The other film was a completely boring video of a man jogging.
Then he had his volunteers listen to a succession of musical tones. (I’m really sorry, but Dr. Goleman, brilliant psychologist though he is, just isn’t very much of a storyteller. Anyway…) They had to listen very carefully and report whether each tone was higher, lower, or the same as the tone before it. There were probably long pauses in between tones, and I’m sure some tones were pretty close. (This experiment sounds like the hearing tests I have to take when I get my aviation medical certificates.) So they had to pay very close attention, but this part of the experiment was really boring.
Then they’d take breaks in between sections of the experiment and write down what had been going through their minds while they were waiting to hear the tones.
Well guess what. The first two groups reported having a lot of memories either of teenage Aborigines getting circumcised or of guys cutting their hands off (or whatever). The third group didn’t report a whole lot of memories of some guy jogging.
The more upset the participants in the first two groups had been by the films, the more memory intrusions of the film they reported during the second part of the experiment. Dr. Horowitz reported the following symptoms:
Pangs of emotion—waves of feeling that come and go, rather than being a continuous mood.
Preoccupation and rumination—a continual awareness of the stressful event that recurs uncontrollably, beyond the bounds of ordinary thinking about the problem.
Intrusive ideas—sudden, unbidden thoughts that have nothing to do with the mental task at hand.
Persistent thoughts, feelings, emotions, or ideas—which the person cannot stop once they start.
Hypervigilance—excessive alertness, scanning and searching with a tense expectancy.
Insomnia—ideas or feelings that disrupt sleep.
Bad dreams—including nightmares, anxious awakening, and upsetting dreams, which didn’t necessarily have any obvious connection to the original event.
Unbidden sensations—sudden, unwanted sensations that are unusually intense or unrelated to the situation at the moment.
Startle reactions—flinching, blanching, and otherwise overreacting to surprises.
So if doing certain things make you have any of those reactions, you don’t want to do them again—if you even wanted to do them the first time. Those are all examples of ways that threats to your survival or reproduction can come back to haunt you by your imagining and remembering them, even though you’re only doing it subconsciously. Whatever happens and however it happens, it takes up space in your consciousness and prevents you from using that space for something else.
Surely, our hunter-gatherer ancestors suffered from anxiety too. After all, they were just a few people on their own in the wilderness. Naturally, they were very good at surviving in the wilderness, but they were still threatened by a lot of things too. They’re the ones who wondered what happened to their dead friend and invented religion so they wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen to them when they died.
So when I say that once upon a time people lived in different conditions from ours and their brains were very well adapted to them, that doesn’t mean they were immune to anxiety. It means that as their brains evolved, they evolved anxiety, but they also evolved things that made up for anxiety.
For instance, the evolution of the abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate abstract ideas gave people a big advantage at hunting animals and doing everything else people do, but those things also made people constantly aware of their own mortality. That constant awareness of their mortality was just one form of anxiety that those mental abilities brought with them.
On the other hand, those same abilities have enabled people to do everything that makes society today different from the way it was 100,000 years ago. As individuals go, every single thing people have ever invented and started using, beginning with the wooden club, they started using because they felt like it worked better than whatever they were using before. The development of agriculture was one example of that. As a result of our using those abilities there are a lot more people in the world now than there were 100,000 years ago, so obviously our combination of mental abilities and the subconscious alterations we make to our perceptions has been a big help to our species in surviving and reproducing.
But what do those mental abilities mean for the future of our species? Well, that’s what the rest of this book is about…