As debilitating as anxiety can be, it also serves a purpose. A little bit of worry can go a long way to having a more productive life.
A couple of Sundays ago, my spouse and I drove to Winnipeg Beach. It was a beautiful warm, sunny day. We walked along the beach and down a back road, viewing many different kinds of birds. The water was unusually clear looking — no blue green algae, no stirred up mud or sand, no zebra mussels. Also, no biting insects. We ended our day with a good meal on a restaurant patio.
You’d think that after a day like that I would have slept soundly that evening. But I made one mistake. Upon returning home, I checked my phone and scrolled through news feeds, digesting stories about coronavirus, politics, the climate crisis, and other horrors. These lodged into my mind stream, sweeping away the pleasant feelings I had experienced earlier. It was as if that idyllic day at the beach had never happened.
Lying in bed fully awake in the grip of disturbing thoughts, I felt a tightness in my chest. Then a sense of mild panic had me sitting straight up. No way could I “meditate” at that moment. I got up, made tea, and read a book. Eventually I felt “normal” again.
The next day I thought about anxiety. What is it? And is it at all useful? I began googling for answers.
The words fear and anxiety are often lumped together as if they were the same thing. But it can be helpful to make a distinction.
Some psychologist define fear as relating to a specific, present danger in the moment, whereas anxiety is future oriented worry, an anticipation of threat.
They feel different in the body. Fear can present in the body as a sudden, gut-wrenching, hair-standing-on-end feeling — like when an oncoming car suddenly swerves into your lane of traffic and a collision seems imminent. It usually dissipates once the danger is past.
Anxiety has a different feel. It can present in the body as butterflies in your stomach, dizziness, perhaps shortness of breath, sweating. If it’s related to something specific, like the anticipation of making a difficult phone call, a job interview, or a speech, it usually passes once the event is underway.
However, if the anxiety is related to something which may be real but less immediate, or something we can’t do much about, like the threat of Covid 19 or the climate crisis or the fact we are going to die at some point, it tends to hang around and keep us up at night.
We may hold the belief that meditation and spiritual practice will rid of us anxiety and fear. We may even judge ourselves for feeling them at all, or deny their presence. We may think we are supposed to be “fearless.” Yet even the most “enlightened” among us will experience fear and anxiety.
Interestingly, according the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, fear is not included in the long list of mental afflictions contained in the Abhidharma, the core teachings on Buddhist psychology.
“Under normal circumstances fear is not a problem, which is why it’s not listed among the afflictions,” writes Thurman. “Fear is a healthy thing, in general. It is awareness of danger. Fear is protective; it’s what helps us to avoid wandering into a hungry lion’s den.”
Anxiety, too, can be a source of strength, according to an article by Shahram Heshmat in Psychology Today: “Worriers are more likely to be more goal-oriented, more organized, and self-disciplined [Stossel, 2013]. They plan effectively for unforeseen events and consequences that others may ignore. They are better at taking care of their health. In short, anxiety is productive when it is not excessive.”
So, fear and anxiety are helpful. Good to know. We just have to learn to not get carried away by them.
“I am convinced that the more we can look these uninvited guests in the eye, with patience and curiosity, and the more we learn to spot their wisdom as well as their mischief, the less grip they will have on us,” writes Harriett Lerner, author of Dancing with Fear.
Buddhist teachings contain many prescriptions for releasing the harmful manifestations of fear and anxiety. Read about some of them here in this Lion’s Roar article.
—Nelle Oosterom