How should we think about anxiety in daily life? The existential psychologist Rollo May wrote in The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) that we still cling to the illogical belief that “mental health is living without anxiety.”
What if anxiety is inevitable?
What if someone said anxiety was your greatest teacher?
According to May, we seem unaware that the delusion of living without anxiety reveals a radical misperception of reality. Our very survival is the result of steps taken long ago to confront anxiety. Originally, the primitive man experienced anxiety as a warning of the threats to his life.
May explained,
But in our day we still see our major threats as coming from the tooth and claws of physical enemies when they are actually largely psychological and in the broadest sense spiritual—that is they deal with meaninglessness. We are no longer prey to tigers and mastodons but to damage to our self-esteem, ostracism by our group, or the threat of losing out in the competitive struggle. The form of anxiety has changed, but the experience remains relatively the same.
Although it is important to note that anxiety has several benefits—confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom. Anxiety sharpens our sensitivity and assures the presence of the tension that is necessary to preserve human existence. When no anxiety exists, the struggle is over, and depression may ensue. For this reason, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard held that anxiety is our “best teacher.” He pointed out that anxiety would also be there whenever a new possibility emerged.
In his classic The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard wrote,
I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure that every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He, therefore, who has learned rightly to be anxious, has learned the most important thing.
Kierkegaard sees man as a creature continually beckoned by possibility, conceives of possibility, visualizes it, and carries it into actuality by creative activity. This capacity for freedom brings with it anxiety. Anxiety is the state of the human being, says Kierkegaard, when he confronts his freedom.
Similarly, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr believed that every act, creative or destructive, involves some element of anxiety. “One has anxiety because it is possible to create—creating one’s self,” writes May, “willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”
Untangling anxiety is understanding the inevitable nature of anxiety. Our freedom and possibility to begin creating the type of life we want to lead causes a certain level of anxiety. A healthy level of anxiety sharpens our focus and reminds us that we are alive.
Attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure, stressed May. By running from our anxiety, we lose our most precious opportunities for the emergence of ourselves and for our education as human beings.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,