The paradox of performing anxiety.
When we think about psychological distress, it is often easy to articulate the differences between those stresses and how they may look to others. When asked, most folks can easily say how it feels to be depressed, panicked, manic, delusional, paranoid, or like we are losing our minds. For better or worse, we have fairly clear cultural understandings of what these things look like in another, which also informs how we think they feel to ourselves. For example, we may imagine one who is paranoid with darting eyes, backing oneself into a corner, or with a worried, furrowed brow. These descriptions both inform our ability to recognize these stressors in others, yet also inform the ways we display these feelings to others when feeling them ourselves. Yet one of the most commonly felt psychological stressors, anxiety, is oddly also one of the more difficult for us to articulate in a similar way.
Anxiety has a clear enough definition and is also relatively simple for clinicians to recognize in others, yet many find it difficult to describe even when they may be feeling it themselves. The symptoms anxiety can manifest may seem outright contradictory at times: feeling both exhausted yet restless, feeling overly fixated yet also inattentive, or wanting to scream but being unable to make any sound at all. Anxiety’s defining feature, an uncontrollable feeling of worry, presents itself in just as many ways as there can be things to worry about. When picturing anxiety, it’s the uncontrollable nature of the emotion which makes it so hard to define, as how does one perform a lack of control?
There is a subtle paradox in play with anxiety which may be connected to the social perception of how we value control and devalue worry or concern. Fears are often not something that we like to discuss openly or easily admit to each other, and sometimes we even end up hiding fears from ourselves. No one likes to admit they are afraid. There is a social benefit to appearing in control of ourselves, and displaying fear to others is directly contrary to the pressure of that social imperative. As a society, we devalue fear and anxiety so much that we have developed a fear of not adhering to those social pressures, which then further enforces those very fears. We have reached the mouth of the anxiety ouroboros, circling back around to eating our own tail, perhaps unsure of which anxiety led us to this self-defeating pattern. Risking contradicting a former president, what we fear in this case isn’t just fear itself, but also the fear of that fear. With the very thought of anxiety becoming a trigger for societally taught disgust, it can prevent us from firmly pushing past it. Our inaction then becomes the physical reality of our psychological worries. Suddenly, the anxiety is real and it’s coming from inside the house, yet many of us would sooner burn our whole house down before acknowledging that irrational fear has control over our bodies.
We can’t perform when we feel anxious, and the most common performance of anxiety demonstrates our inability to take action. We may then feel incapable, feel alone, and feel embarrassed to even believe it is happening to us in the moment.
We prohibit the thought and thereby believe we can prohibit the actions. We freeze, we ignore, we try not to think about it, we fight it, we run from it, but most of all we certainly don’t admit to it. Yet during times of prohibition, we often find that which is prohibited only gains in notoriety. Demand builds with scarcity, and many types of emotions increase when we don’t allow an outlet for them. Yet an oversaturation of anything often changes its tone and may end up being unrecognizable at a certain point. Unchecked desire may become the precursor to infatuation. Frustrations left unmitigated may develop into anger. Fears though, when left to their own devices, can manifest when we try our best to avoid them. We perform fear itself with a scream, a primal lack of control, or a wild burst of abject speechless silence. In this same manner, unchecked anxiety becomes a performance of both taut tension and also the most limp of resignation.
This is where speaking to others, where clinical talk therapy, can have an impact that we all can understand, perhaps even better than we understand the anxieties that may have previously kept us from dealing with our fears. Many of us allow anxiety to prevent us from performing actions which bring joy to our lives and relief from the pressures we feel in our daily lives. The relief that we feel from pressure, the release of talking about our worries and concerns, is just as real as the way our bodies manifest anxiety itself. Speaking about our anxieties is often the clearest way for most of us to move past them, which allows us all to perform better for those we love and for ourselves.
