Befriending Anxiety in a Disconnected World

I’ve often wondered about the anxiety that seems to be so pervasive these days. When Meredith and I returned from our nine-month sojourn in Latin America a few years back, the anxiety I sensed from everyday interactions with people—in their body language, tone, and energy—was so palpable that it created a kind of reverse culture shock. 

One thing I noticed, for example, was how much more often people here in the US—maybe especially in the Midwest—say "thank you" and "sorry."  People in places we had stayed, like Peru, didn't seem to feel a need to excuse their own or congratulate others' every action. While we may like to imagine those phrases are just signs of politeness, I at least usually use them not as genuine expressions of gratitude or remorse, but in order to avoid the anxiety of possibly offending someone. It's like a constant feeling of walking on eggshells, making sure my actions appear blameless in the eyes of others. 

Not only do folks in the US seem more anxious than elsewhere, anxiety also seems to be on the rise over time. In addition to anti-anxiety medication becoming more necessary, it gets talked about a lot more in casual conversation than it did a decade or two ago. A quick online inquiry tells me that searches for the word have increased over 300% since 2004. Someone may argue that anxiety itself isn’t on the rise, only the language to describe it and willingness to be open about it. But while that may explain part of the story, I don’t buy that it’s all of it. I believe that the post-industrial, highly technified world we live in is indeed leading us to be more anxious, and my experience among more indigenous cultures like in the Peruvian Andes would seem to corroborate that. In my opinion, therefore, anxiety should never be seen as a personal problem, something that some people "have" and need to "fix" about themselves on their own. It's something that's in the field. No amount of inner work will dismantle the structural injustices that have created an anxious culture; only systemic change will do that. I hope that lets those of us who experience significant anxiety to breathe a collective sigh of validation.

But as is always the case in living in a broken and unjust world, there are some things we can practice for our own personal liberation in the meantime. My training in somatics has given me a new lens through which to view anxiety, as well as other emotions that we tend to consider unpleasant, like anger and sadness. Often, when these "negative" feelings come up, we want to get rid of them, almost like a surgeon would cut out and remove a tumor from the body.

But unfortunately, as experience has probably shown us by now, it doesn’t work like that. Our somas are far too complex and dynamic to be able to simply remove a tendency we have without disturbing the rest of the system. Nor would we want to, if we understood what that would actually entail. 

This desire to eradicate the emotions or aspects of ourselves that we consider "bad" is deeply rooted in our cultural conditioning to see the world in a good vs. bad binary, in which there are “good” things that we should do or have more of, and “bad” or even “evil” things we should avoid or get rid of. That might be a useful framework if the goal is to cling to a sense of certainty or to control people's behavior, but it's not how organisms, ecosystems, or the universe at large work. All things in existence are part of a whole, and therefore contribute to a kind of harmony. Anxiety, therefore, has a role to play in the psyche of the human being.

Instead of figuring out how to get rid of our anxiety, the better question is, “How has this tendency served or protected me?”  The answer to this question is the missing piece that, if truly contemplated and grappled with, can unlock a more holistic and compassionate framework for looking at those parts of ourselves that we wish would just go away. With regards to most, if not all, of our conditioned tendencies, the answer to the question is that it has protected our safety, dignity, or belonging in some way.

If we are anxious, we should try and remember that the anxiety is trying to alert us to something. It may be that we are physically unsafe, or that we feel our sense of human dignity is at stake. And perhaps most commonly nowadays, anxiety can arise when we don’t feel an inherent sense of belonging. This is why I think it’s become so much more pervasive in the US today: because real community has been eroded in favor of the individualism, "self-reliance," and isolation promoted and rewarded by capitalism. Our anxiety is trying to get us to act in a way that will protect our belonging and inclusion in groups or society as a whole. Hence the tendency to apologize and thank so profusely: we want to appear agreeable to the people around us. This is an intelligent and adaptive embodied response to a culture that feels increasingly unsafe and disconnected.

That's of course not to say our anxiety is always helpful. It may have grown out its usefulness in many situations, or cause us to react to stress in disproportionate and destructive ways. But instead of trying to get rid of it, what would it look like to befriend it by offering it gratitude for protecting us? This paradigm-shifting process, called "blending," is one of the most powerful practices I've used with clients in somatic coaching sessions. It almost always leads to a big emotional release, because it validates that part of them that they have been demonizing for so long. They recognize that there's been an inner-conflict, but that there's a way forward for the contradictory parts of themselves to find a sense of harmony. And because the anxiety feels validated, it's able to loosen up some. So paradoxically, by affirming the anxiety and its usefulness, we take away some of its power.

Now when I notice from my clenched shoulders, rigid back, and shallow breathing that my old friend has returned, I've made it a practice to take a deep breath and offer it a genuine thank you, acknowledging that it's trying to protect me in some way. As I invite it in, and include it as one among many parts that make up who I am, I usually feel an immediate sense of relief, not because the situation's changed, but because I'm allowing the anxiety—and therefore more of my whole Self—to be present.

In the long term, I hope that we as a people start prioritizing the building of a world with more safety and belonging, so as to relieve anxiety’s burden of keeping us alert and safe. At the very least, we can make subtle moves to build community around us and thereby create some resilience in our nervous systems. In the meantime, we can honor anxiety for the service it provides us in an uncertain, rapidly changing, and often unsafe world.