If Turkeys thought, they’d run away a week before Thanksgiving Day.
But Turkeys can’t anticipate, so I’ll have turkey on my plate.
— Jack Prelutsky
My daughter came home from kindergarten one brisk November day and proudly recited that little verse, right down to the name of its author. Aside from thinking it was adorable, I recall nodding my head with a certain wistfulness. Not because I identified with those poor, unthinking turkeys doomed to be consumed, but because in some perverse way, I envied their mindlessness. What must it feel like not to worry about what will happen tomorrow? If you are among the teeming multitude of human beings who suffer from some form of anxiety disorder (forty million in the United States alone according to the American Psychological Association, and who knows how many in places where they have greater reason to feel anxious), then one thing you don’t need to worry about is ending up on on someone’s dinner plate, because all you ever do is anticipate. Some time back, my doctor informed me that, based upon the more or less chronic symptoms I’d reported, I was one of these unfortunates. Because I don’t want to go to my grave with this curse on me or those I’ve spawned, and because I’m, well…anxious to know what other sufferers may have done about it, I’m taking a leap into the pool of oversharing. Maybe we can help each other.
I have a notion that anxiety, which we think of as a ‘mental’ thing, may arise from body memories ‘referred’ to the mind and then looped back to the body (not that the two are in any real sense separate, but it’s convenient to see them that way), and if so, may be treatable via the body. I’ve learned that this idea isn’t original with me, but more on that in the end note. First, definitions. If we’re going to do battle, we need to set the terms of engagement.
Anxiety is humankind’s common affliction. Nothing else comes close to its universality, except for the inevitability of death, which, in yet another loop enclosing the experience of anxiety, is a primary trigger. Paul Tillich described existential anxiety as a state in which “a being is aware of its possible nonbeing.” The Buddha himself asserted that the impermanence of life was the great catalyst to our profound discomfort, a discomfort he sought to relieve through practices and precepts that have retained their currency (witness the popularity of Sam Harris’s Waking Up mindfulness app). The capacity for mortal dread appears to be baked into the condition of living, at least for those that, unlike turkeys, think. Surely all the more intelligent animals — dogs, for example — experience some version of it, too, but it seems to be only homo sapiens sapiens whose mind casts out so wildly ahead of its body’s present position in space and time and projects itself straight into the maw of imagined catastrophe. What if becomes an obsessive when. Anxiety has a demonically recursive, mirror-in-mirror quality: we not only worry about tomorrow, we worry about worrying about tomorrow, and so on.
The clearest word for this is apprehension, from the Latin meaning “to grab or seize,” and isn’t it curious that it can be used to characterize both irrational fear and understanding? Kierkegaard wrote that it was “the possibility of possibility” that induced anxiety, so it could be argued, I suppose, that it is the serrated edge of a heightened and adaptive awareness. That was certainly true in the case of the ancestral human who sensed the presence of a lion in the tall grass and thereby survived, but to feel continual dread in the absence of lions is misery at best, and at worst, madness. To “seize upon” a negative thought is to be seized by it, and from there on, problems compound.
We understand the hydraulics and chemistry of what is called the HPA axis. The sympathetic nervous system, wired to allow us to fight or outrun the lion, marshalled by signals from the amygdala, sends frantic messages to the hypothalamus, which then sends riders galloping down to the adrenal glands, which flood our system with norepenephrine, cortisol and other hormones, telegraphing a message back to our brain saying, “be very afraid.”
Again, in the absence of real monsters, “Afraid of what?” is the pertinent question, and the answer seems to be anything and everything, whether causation is external or internal, that puts us up against things we think we can’t cope with. Things about which we feel we’re not ‘up to the task,’ or that we are imposters, faking it, and will soon enough be found out. That there may be no real me there at all, and what there is surely ain’t good enough. The nadir of this cycle of infinite regress into the labyrinth of the imagined self is the panic attack. If you happen to one of the roughly 97% of people who claim never to have had one, you are deeply fortunate, but don’t claim immunity just yet. You may not have faced your crisis of confidence. All it takes is for a single disabling thought metastasize and take command of your body. And the body is a full participant. As I’ve suggested, panic attacks describe mind and body locked in a feedback loop. It may be this loop that causes the escalation that sends some of us to the emergency room, certain we’re having a heart attack. Example: thought enters mind — what if I miss the plane? Body responds with tightness in chest. Mind reads this as danger: the lion is near. Norepenephrine surges. The breath is shallow and rapid, sweat breaks out. Within seconds, and utterly without good cause, things spin out of control. Some pray. Some call 911. That’s the common element: you think you’ll die. But you probably won’t miss the plane. You’re way too cautious for that.
Again, the neurologists are pretty clear about all this. We are reacting — at least those unfortunate 3% of us — as we were adapted to react to the proximity of mortal danger in what evolutionary psychologists call the “ancestral environment.” Back then, some stalwart member of the clan, one of the most vigilant, remained by the fire, hearing every crack of burning tinder as the snap of a twig in the nearby brush. This is me in the lion-free 21st century. I am not afraid of missing my plane: I am afraid that I will be eaten. At least, my body thinks so. Why the stunning lack of proportion?
Missing the plane, of course, is not a mortal threat. It may cause a great deal of inconvenience, or cost us money, or imperil a rendezvous, but it won’t kill us. Here’s what I think the two scenarios have in common, and what the body is ‘tricked’ into remembering: the departure time of the plane, like the arrival of the lion in the brush, is an occasion over which we have no control, and for many of us, the illusion of control — over our schedules, our spending, our regimens, even our relationships — is the lacquer on the shell of sanity. We do not part with it easily, and any life coach or spiritual advisor worth his or her salt will cite this as a major source of problems. I’m not talking about the sort of control that’s implied by the epithet “control freak.” I’m talking about our very sense of personal agency, and our need to believe that the future — the next minute, day, or week — can be predicted with any degree of certitude.
There are no atheists in foxholes, so they say. You won’t find many in the panic room either. I’m referring to that place in the dungeon of the skull — and in the extremities and maybe even in the soul that goes on full alert when that feedback loop kicks in. I wasn’t raised to pray, but I find my way to some version of it quickly enough when the holy dreads come over me. It’s instinctive, as surely it was for our neolithic ancestors. The prayer may not be spoken, nor made to any familiar god. It simply begs “help me,” or, as in the Hesychast’s Jesus Prayer, “have mercy on me.” Maybe you’re a weekend Buddhist and you recite Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Maybe you’re an atheist and you put on a Sam Harris podcast. The impulse is still “religious.” The scientists say that our brains aren’t getting enough GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid), or maybe are getting too much orexin. The biochemistry of anxiety gets updated all the time. But one thing remains unchanged: in place of the snap of a twig or a growl in the bracken, there is a thought. A thought that dislocates us from the present moment and dangles us above what may come in the worst case. And, oh, the awesome power of that thought!
I have no expert knowledge about the physiology or psychology of what is now known as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), a condition, or rather, a state of mind that I now realize I’ve not been free of for more than a day or two at a time since my adolescence and possibly earlier. I have only my ‘lived experience,’ but as with any sort of pain, that’s enough. The NIH tells us that 3.1% of the U.S. population suffers, with some regularity, more or less what I’ve described above. That’s a congregation substantial enough to preach to, and probably one in need of a pastor. I’m not that pastor, but perhaps I can encourage one to come lay his hands on us. Or at least hand us a therapy puppy. It can be really scary. I’m not a fearful person. I’ve rappelled down sheer rock faces and ridden white water and risked my heart on women way out of my league, but this shit…it scares me. What can be done about it?
Surely, answers to the question of why some of us seem born to worry for the rest of the world lie partly in biochemistry. And counter-chemistry will indeed provide passing relief. I’ve fed my system beta blockers like Propranolol that attenuate the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, and benzodiazepines (“benzos”) like Lorazepam that tamp down hyper-vigilance and allow for a reasonably relaxing holiday or just a decent night’s sleep, but are also highly addictive and can dull the brain. I have flirted, and continue to flirt, with far more radical but quite possibly more efficacious therapies like ayahuasca, and am intrigued by the research on the effects of microdosing psychedelics. And yes, some people do seem to achieve measurable results from various forms of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), among which I would be inclined to include vipassana, commonly known as mindfulness meditation (this is what is so lovingly packaged in Sam Harris’s app). But before embracing any of these therapies, I think we need to take a more ‘mindful’ look at exactly what we are treating. It’s nothing less than a way of looking at the world, and this gets into metaphysics.
It’s my belief that the kind of anxiety that leads to panic attacks is not symptomatic of a congenital disease of the nervous system, a left-right hemisphere imbalance, childhood trauma, or substance abuse. These, if they factor in, are aggravating, second order factors. Experience tells me that anxiety disorder is, on one level, an exquisitely mis-tuned sensitivity to the tenuousness of existence and the capriciousness of fate — to the fact that at any moment, anything could go horribly wrong. And this is not untrue. It could. So we post ourselves as sentries at the city gate of our lives. Who better than one with such a keen sense of the everpresent threat? We cannot let our guard down, for if we do, something far worse than our worst fears will ensue.
In attempting to function rationally amidst irrational worries, we adopt a kind of magical thinking: if I gather my defenses, if I paint the sign in blood on the lintel, the plague may pass over. We believe that our fear of the feared event is a kind of inoculation. A prophylactic. And indeed, it can be. Worriers have a high value around people like Donald Trump, who don’t worry at all, and the Cassandras of the world are often right. But mostly, this is a self-deception. We don’t stop bombs from falling by lying awake and worrying about them, though as a child I sometimes hoped I could. Those of us who fall prey to this kind of thinking lack the equanimity to know that the storm will pass from our minds. To quote Sam Harris, probably quoting one of his Dzogchen masters, “everything that arises in consciousness will pass away.” If we fail to find that equanimity, then in another feedback loop we are inclined to self-fulfill our own prophecies to prove that we were right to be worried. Our vigilance buys us not safety but personal and professional disaster. Broken relationships and whispers of madness, as with the Noah-like protagonist played by Michael Shannon in Jeff Nichols’ brilliant film TAKE SHELTER (of course, he turned out to be right!). The problem he had and we have is a spiritual as well as a psychological problem. At heart of that problem is the feeling that we have no protection, and that therefore we must provide it. No one else will.
I’ve often considered not only the question of what manner of genetic mischief or bad parenting or childhood trauma may predispose one to debilitating anxiety, but whether those so afflicted might, in some cases, simply belong to a different category of person. That would be a person who, like Thom Yorke in Radiohead’s “Creep,” sings “I don’t belong here.” Or, like Howard the Duck, laments that he was “born into a world he never made.” This we might call the Gnostic explanation for the etiology of anxiety. If we’re not meant to be in the lives we have, perhaps we were misplaced. Perhaps a mistake was made at our expense. This would certainly account for the agitation, the continual jumping out of the present moment that characterizes the condition. There is someplace else I’m supposed to be! There are ancient and venerable bodies of thought — Vedic, Orphic, Neo-Platonic, and others — that give support to this perception. We fell away from what was intended for us, and now we suffer. But I don’t want to glorify it as any sort of martyrdom. It’s awful. And I feel sure that the mages and philosophers of these traditions, given a friend, or a child in such distress, would find some way to say, “We must find a way to live in the world we have. Que sera, sera. Let it go.”
Because finally, living with severe anxiety is no way to live. We can’t be truly kind, or compassionate, nor at our best as artisans or teachers or code writers or corporate titans, if each day dawns in the shadow of this baseline dread, if the first cup of coffee is consumed in an acrid fog of apprehension. Those of us so afflicted need to do nothing less than to find a new way to be. It will never be in our nature to say, “What? Me Worry?” but we can ‘amortize’ our angst across enough accounts to make it manageable and experience the discomfort of anxiety as a transient experience, and not as a life-threatening condition. We can drop back from the front lines and be a little bit less the hero (“I’m the only one who can hold this thing together!”). We can relieve our inner captain of duty — at least until there is a reef to steer around. Then, when we need him to take the wheel, he may do so with a greater degree of calm.
As for me, I’m going to try “blocking my orexin receptors” (I haven’t figured out how yet), work on stimulating my vagus nerve (look it up — you’ll be impressed), keep taking my probiotics (some think that the correct balance of gut microbes work to produce the calming neurotransmitter GABA), perhaps try sertraline as an alternative to the benzos, keep up my daily sessions with the Sam Harris app, and maybe even follow David Lynch’s advice and try Transcendental Meditation. Above all, I am going to try to love better, and to give myself a little break. The world can wait while I tend to this garden.
End Note: Here is something I came across in a web article from the NIH about ‘rumination.’ I think it sums up the whole syndrome pretty well.
“Rumination is defined as engaging in a repetitive negative thought process that loops continuously in the mind without end or completion. A thought (wanted or not) is a finite thing, a singular moment in time. On the other hand, actively thinking (rumination) is taking that thought and analyzing it, turning it over in the mind and over engaging with it.”
“What’s happening is that our anxious thoughts create anxious feelings in our bodies. And then our anxious feelings fuel our anxious thoughts even more, creating an endless feedback loop between our thoughts and feelings in our body. At some point it can feel like you’re stuck inside a black hole and can’t find your way out. Does this sound familiar?”
“But, if you ‘drop the thoughts’ and allow yourself to simply feel the sensations of anxiety instead, then the feedback loop is instantly broken. ‘Dropping the thoughts’ means asking your brain to let go of thinking for a moment and instead bringing your attention to what you feel in your body. Notice what sensations you feel that tell you that you’re anxious. Do you feel tightness in your chest, buzzing, constriction? Often there is a sense of relief simply from allowing ourselves to feel the feelings of anxiety that we’ve been trying to avoid. Often the feeling fades on its own if we simply let ourselves feel it.”
