Have you ever had a moment when you felt unexpectedly anxious? Most of us have. In the Origin of Anxieties I argue that there are several remarkably ordinary reasons why we sometimes develop anxiety problems. The third of these reasons is that when we have one of these unexpected moments, we make a judgement call and decide we shouldn’t feel like we do. Rather than accepting our feelings we judge them as unpleasant and unwanted. We make this decision against a background of past experience, and what we think we have learned and been told about feeling anxious; it is all about our knowledge and expectations.
When we decide we shouldn’t feel like it, we turn a moment of anxiety into something to be concerned about. Quite naturally we will ask why we felt like it. What sort of explanations do we look for? Well, not many of us invent ideas for ourselves. Instead, we draw on ideas from those around us, the media and wider culture.
What explanations are most readily available? Well, today we are usually told anxiety is something we ‘have’ or ‘suffer from’. It may be caused by events and circumstances. It may be partly genetic or to do with the chemicals swirling or not swirling in our brains.
As a result, we may ask some of the following sorts of questions.
Why did it happen?
Could it happen again?
How bad can it get?
Can I do something to stop it happening again?
These are all sensible questions if we think our bad feelings have ‘happened’ to us. If we ask, ‘why did it happen?’ the following are some of the most likely answers we come up with.
I was tired/ I hadn’t slept properly
I was not feeling well/I was starting a cold
It was something to do with the lighting or the noise
There were too many people/it was crowded
I didn’t know how to leave the situation/I couldn’t see the door
i wasn’t in control
I felt I wanted to get home/I only feel safe at home
Does it make a difference which of these we choose to believe? It does, and it matters a lot. Whichever we pick immediately becomes a theory for predicting when we might have another episode of feeling anxious. If we think it was because we were tired, we are likely to become more concerned about how well we sleep and what we take on if we’re feeling tired. If we think it was because the place was crowded, we are likely to become more aware of how many people are in a place and might start avoiding places that are crowded (not just where we felt anxious originally).
Thinking it was because we weren’t in control is a bigger and more general explanation with consequences. There are many situations where we are not in control (flying, travelling by train, being a passenger in a car, having a meal out or with friends, standing in a queue, going to the dentist, and many more). All of these can be situations we become wary of, but only because we have chosen this explanation.
Thinking we needed to get home and concluding we’re only safe at home has even bigger consequences. If we settle on this one, we will want to avoid going out. We’re likely to feel anxious at the mere thought of having to go out.
So the explanation we ‘choose’ makes a difference. Each has consequences but some are much bigger than others.
Once we have settled on an explanation it can be hard to let go of it. For example, if one day you feel anxious on a train it can be difficult to shift the idea that you might feel anxious again on a train. If we then make several other journeys quite happily, we tend to ignore this as evidence the train is not the problem. Instead, we only look for times that seem to confirm our explanation (confirmation bias). As Karl Popper has argued we should always look for, and emphasise, examples that disprove our ‘chosen’ explanations.
In time without meaning to we can drift to bigger and broader explanations and so build our problem further. The point is that the explanations we end up believing are not incidental; they matter and are an intrinsic part of our problems.
We can also be tempted to ask other big questions, such as, “Is there something wrong with me?” There are many unhelpful answers to this that are readily available in the media and wider culture. All of them ignore a simple common sense psychological understanding of anxiety; that we can only feel anxious whenever we predict something that we don’t want; anxiety is something we are, in effect, doing in the way we are thinking, and it lasts only as long as we keep doing it. It is hard to recognise this because we are constantly encouraged to think of anxiety as happening to us.
When we have a moment of anxiety, we could accept it and not decide we shouldn’t be feeling like it. We can then pay attention to how we must be thinking anxiously. When we do this, we are simply using our feelings of anxiety as a natural signal we are concerned about something.
There is a lot more to say about this subject. Our thinking is complex and always will be. One important issue is that it is not unusual for us to feel anxious in an ordinary everyday situation because there is something much bigger going on in our lives (a relationship breaking down, worries about illness, money, security, status, etc). These worries can tick away in the back of our minds. They cause us emotional problems either because we feel we can’t face them, we don’t know what to do, or we simply have not recognised how important they are to us.
A cup of tea.
If you’d like to support my work a cup of tea is all I need……and maybe a biscuit or two
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