Anxiety

I'm preaching on anxiety this coming Wednesday, so it's on my mind again. At least, it's in the front of my mind--rather than the back, where it usually lives.

At Union Seminary, I took a class titled "Anxiety" with Dr. Ann Ulanov and I remember being struck by the notion that that anxiety is probably the single greatest motivating force in day-to-day human behavior. Life, it seems, is just anxiety-producing... so we just end up spending a lot of our time acting out of our anxieties. We don't always recognize how powerful anxiety is because it lies mostly in our unconscious mind, often escaping our direct gaze.

Kierkegaard called anxiety an existential condition, precipitated by each human being's struggle to be human. Do we become a Self, integrating a mortal body with a psyche that reaches for transcendence; do we actualize our freedom; do we find a bridge between the finite and the infinite, between our free will and our biological necessity?


Kierkegaard said "nope." We fall into despair, most of us, at the prospect of life. We either fail to transcend our bodies, or we fail to reign in our psyches. Kierkegaard felt like we basically suck at the task of living. Despair, he said, was inevitable... and it all begins with anxiety.

(BTW, Kierkegaard felt like God was the way out of this mess...)

Freud found anxiety everywhere he looked, too. He said that anxiety functioned as a reaction to perceived threats against the ego. It's basically a response to danger--but in this case "invisible" dangers to a person's sense of self. We establish "defense mechanisms," Siggy said--behaviors which try to "remove" ourselves from the anxiety-producing threat.


I like both of these descriptions. I certainly resonate with Kierkegaard's sense of anxiety, despair, and faith as part of the existential wrestling to claim whatever humanity we have. I also like Freud's notion that anxiety is just about the most common thing--just a response to common instinctual drives that make us uneasy.

In my own life, I get anxious mostly around trying to please people--trying to make others happy and to make a positive impression. I exert a lot of energy for the sake of keeping up appearances, and the prospect of disappointing people antagonizes me.

I think my constant effort to rationalize things and to understand them is part of my defense structure against my anxiety. I work extra hard to sound smart and wise--and if I feel I can't, I just shut up. The effect, however masterful I feel, is that I sometimes come off as aloof or distant--like I think I'm better than others in a group.

What makes you anxious? What do you do about it?