One of the most difficult features of anxiety
is that it tends to be all-consuming. It squats
in the middle of our minds and refuses to
let anything else in or through. Though the
anxiety causes us great pain, it denies any
attempts to be questioned, analysed, probed
or reconfigured. We are both terrified and
unable to think beyond our terror. Our thoughts
become low, relentless, repetitive, stymied
things: returning again and again to the issue
of whether the door is locked, the accounts
were signed off or the social media account
is not under attack. Anxiety dominates over
and excludes any other form of mental activity;
all that will be in our minds is terror. Impregnable
and bullying, anxiety in effect shuts down
our central faculties. But there is one nimble
way to try to outwit anxiety – and that
is with a question that recognises a fundamental
feature of anxiety: that it is frequently
a smokescreen for something else, something
beyond what we consciously think is worrying
us, that we’re in fact concerned with or
sad about. One of the peculiar facets of our
minds is that we may choose to feel anxious
rather than to confront things that may be
yet more painful or emotionally awkward in
our lives. It can be easier to fret than to
know ourselves properly. We might feel anxious
about whether we’re going to get to the
airport on time as an escape from the greater
challenge of wondering whether this holiday
is even worth it and whether our spouse still
loves us. Or we might get intensely anxious
about a financial issue in order to avoid
a yet trickier acknowledgement of our confusion
at the course of our emotional lives. Or we
may develop a sexual anxiety as an alternative
to thinking about our sense of self-worth
and the childhood that destroyed it. Panic
may be invited to shield us from more profound
sources of self-aware agony. And yet, of course,
we are always better off getting to the root
cause of our troubles, rather than filling
our minds with diversionary panic – and
in order to do so, we would be wise at points
to ask ourselves a simple but possibly highly
revealing question: ‘If your mind wasn’t
currently filled with these particular anxious
thoughts, what might you have to think about
right now?’ The question, as simple in structure
as it is acute in design, is liable to unlock
a moment of original insight. The answer might
go like this: – I might realise how sad
and lonely I am… – I might realise how
angry I feel towards my partner… – I might
realise how abandoned I feel… And that,
of course, is precisely what we should be
doing now. Filling our minds with, and processing,
all the stuff that our anxiety was trying
to keep at bay. Certain anxieties can be taken
at face value, for they do clearly relate
to worrying things in the world. But there
is another class of them, and a rather large
one at that, that is there for no better purpose
than to distract us from understanding important
parts of ourselves. If we need to suffer,
and often we will, the least we can do is
to ensure that we are suffering for the right
reasons. At points, we should trade our anxiety
in for something far more important: a confrontation
with the real ambivalence and complexity of
our lives – and we should do so thanks to
a naively simple question: ‘If your mind
wasn’t currently filled with these particular
anxious thoughts, what might you have to think
about right now?’
Our Wisdom Display Cards explore what it really means to be wise and how we can strive to become more enlightened in our everyday lives.
