Anxiety

The Physics of Emotion(ing) Library

Michael D. Lukens, PhD

“As humans we don’t understand much about the survival-supporting, emotional “equipment” that Mother Nature gave us to identify and handle threat. In fact, we turn elements of THAT equipment into a threat itself! (Anxiety is the Fear of Fear). We turn our friend into our enemy due to our ignorance.”

Anxiety

Dr. Lukens’ Definition

Anxiety is just fuzzy fear. Anxiety is a word we have for the idea that there are types of fear that we can't explain well.  Some say the idea of anxiety is necessary because these sorts of fears are irrational, and so it’s more of a characteristic of the person or his or her nervous system that is accounting for the fear response than any “real threat.”   This is in contrast to rational fears, which “make sense” since there is clearly something to be afraid of.  If there’s no rational basis for the fear then we “wouldn’t have it”--  unless we have anxiety.  I actually think that's a patently absurd conclusion.    

I believe in the validity of the internal world of each person as it has been constructed by them according to the dictates of their structure and their learning history. The 4 year old does not have an irrational fear of the bogeyman. The fear of the bogeyman makes no sense to the adult, so we can claim that it's irrational. But we miss the fact that the “context” for the bogeyman fear IS meaningful in the world of the 4 year old. If we delegitimize fear in any way, it’s actually arrogant of us, not insightful, or more “intelligent” of us to see it this way. The bogeyman has been scaring children for centuries, and though no adults have ever laid eyes on him, he’s real enough to anyone who is afraid of him. The same is true with ghosts of all kinds, and oh yes, the God we never see, not to mention germs that we know exist but are not visible . . . you see, the rational of one person is the irrational of another.

To make matters worse, the belief in anxiety as a condition unto itself supports our getting fuzzy and remaining fuzzy about our real fears.  It’s understandable that we will stubbornly cling to the idea that we have anxiety rather than a fear we're not willing to acknowledge.

If you feel like you can't acknowledge your fears and you want to keep the idea of anxiety around for comfort’s sake, for face-saving, or for lack of a plan to deal with a more visible and explainable fear, then you may want to continue to use anxiety as your “explanatory foil.”   But excuse the rest of us for figuring out that we don’t do ourselves any favors by having the concept of anxiety cloud our understanding of what makes us tick. If you'd like to do something game-changing about your anxiety and your fears, then exploring the PoE Theory might just clarify things for you.