Why am I anxious?
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really heard anyone say, “boy, I love being anxious.” Many people even explicitly wish to not have anxiety. Anxiety gets such a bad rap, and yet without it, humans would be vulnerable to a whole host of problems. Take the following story I’ve adapted from Sheri Turrell and Mary Bell's version:
The scene is set many, many generations ago. Perhaps it is so far back as to be the time when you and I had common ancestors. Two of these ancestors, Bill and Dirk, are gathered behind a rock. They were sent out by their village to find a new food source, as their tribe was undergoing a food shortage. Off in the distance, Bill and Dirk look out and see an amorphous blob, a fuzzy outline that they can’t make out much detail of.
Bill elbows Dirk, and says, “hey, bro, looks like we found ourselves a blueberry bush.” Dirk looks at Bill warily and says, “I don’t know, man. That looks like a bear to me. I saw Sally get gobbled up by a bear last week. Let’s just chill.” Bill, smirking, says, “Okay, man, I don’t know what’s up with you. Those are some lit blueberries. I’d bet my life on it. You stay behind. More for me.” And Bill heads off into the distance and does not return.
What do you think that Dirk is likely to learn?
For starters, he’s pretty likely to walk away thinking, “Bill sure did get gobbled up.” Second, and more importantly, he’s likely to learn that in the face of uncertainty it’s better to stay put because when you don’t know what’s happening, it could be a bear and you can get gobbled up, just like Sally and Bill.
But there’s a problem with this. Dirk’s village was experiencing food scarcity. So, he heads home and starves along with the rest of his village.
Now, let’s flip the scenario a little bit. Imagine that Bill never returned, not because he became bear food, but because he did indeed find a blueberry bush. Not only did he find a blueberry bush but he found a nice cave lady from the next village over and started a family with her, had plenty of children, and never saw any need to return to his home village where they were starving.
In reality, the ancestors that were most likely to survive, to go on and create us, were those that moved slowly toward the unknown in the face of uncertainty. They did not plow ahead impulsively like Bill in our original story, nor did they run away like Dirk, losing the opportunity to get more information and assuming the worst as a protective measure. In all likelihood, the ancestor that crept forward, despite feeling anxious, getting a little more information at a time with his direct, five-senses experience of the world, was the most likely to be able to safely determine food or threat.
One way to think of anxiety is as a subtype of fear. If our pal Sally was actually gobbled up by a bear, you can best believe she was frightened right before she became a meal, assuming she saw the bear coming. Fear is the signal that tells us we are interpreting a situation as dangerous. It sends a bunch of rapid signals throughout our nervous systems that aid in the threat detection and response system. This is sometimes called the fight-or-flight response but I’d suggest we’re missing a few Fs here, since we actually needed a few different kinds of strategies back in the day to be able to survive the kinds of threats our ancestors faced.
Strategy #1. Flight: it can be really helpful to make a run for it when escape is possible.
Strategy #2. Fight: if there’s a good chance we can overpower the threat and especially if escape might be tricky, fighting might be a solid approach.
Strategy #3. Freeze: when escape is not possible and we don’t have a chance in hell of being able to overpower the aggressor, often we freeze. We can see examples of this in the animal kingdom, like with opossum’s that feign death. The thought is that predators sometimes lose interest in a dead animal, so they’ll wander off.
Strategy #4: Fawn: If we are dependent on the predator for some sort of resource or need, escape isn’t possible and we can’t overpower the aggressor or deter its interest. This is when a fawn response comes in handy. Konrad Lorenz, a famous scientist of animal behavior, proposed that baby mammals often share similar features (e.g. big eyes, chubby cheeks) because the features that elicited nurturing behaviors in their parents often aided in their survival.
Each of these responses are actually quite useful for humans today, and the good news for us, is that, unlike opposums, our nervous systems are actually capable of lending a hand to all four (and more). One way to understand PTSD is as a disorder where the fear-response strategies take over in response to perceived, rather than actual, threats and/or the person becomes less responsive to actual threats. It’s also common for people to find themselves stuck in a narrow range of possible responses to perceived and/or actual threats, making it harder to flex around the different kinds of situations they may encounter that call for different strategies.
Anxiety, like all of our emotions, is at its core a signal that something is happening. It does not tell us what is happening, just that there is some nonroutine event occurring and that we are uncertain about it. If we didn’t have anxiety, we might be prone to being a bit more like Bill, plowing ahead impulsively and “betting our lives” on things without taking stock of the risk. We’d have had a hard time out in the wild, let alone in the modern era when the types of threats we encounter are more diverse, though often less concrete than the possibility of bears.
I often think of anxiety disorder as a process in which people repeatedly avoid uncertainty, making an error in attributing the source of threat. Instead of allowing anxiety to be signal that something is happening and waiting it out until we know more, what we call an anxiety disorder is a pattern of avoidance where the uncertainty itself becomes identified as the threat. Through specialized treatment like exposure therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) it is possible to find that balance: to slow down and notice the experience of uncertainty, widening our view to all that is happening around and within us, and proceed slowly and mindfully as we head toward what matters.
