Word of The Year 2018

If the known description of anxiety is true, it begins as a response to the perceived threat of a challenge.

Anxiety comes from the gut and fires a shot to the mind. In that instant we are given a set of choices pertinent to our lives. In its primary state, anxiety is an important cautionary feeling that requires a response. Our response maps our lives, determining the emotional contribution we make to ourselves.

Any challenge comes with risks, otherwise it wouldn’t be a challenge. To walk across a road, we look left and right to assess the risk of taking that path. If the path is clear, we begin our journey but remain acutely aware of our surroundings until we’ve reached the other side. Anxiety (or fear) constantly guides us as we respond to a challenge.

When a new challenge (for example, getting fit) is assessed objectively, anxiety borne from its perceived threat can be seen in its true light; either unreal, unmanageable or manageable. If the threat is unreal, the challenge may be embraced. If unmanageable, external help can be sought for guidance. When manageable, the challenge can be welcomed with care.

Equally, when an old challenge (say, giving up smoking) continues to gnaw at the conscience, its threat can be seen as real and action can be taken. 

The outcome of any challenge, from making a cup of tea to joining someone in matrimony, is generally defined by how we respond to it.

If madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, anxiety is its feeder. With problem gamblers, craving the next win is anxiety in full flight. Even losing has its benefits, each race pumping dopamine into our brain whatever the outcome. With alcohol and drug addiction, it’s much the same. The hit does its job but we remain in its grip.

Conversely, sanity can be described as doing the same thing over and over in order to achieve a positive result. When we embrace a challenge and continue to do so, we start to feel better about ourselves. While anxiety is always there to feed the challenge, its presence, which we become more accustomed to, decreases as we remain loyal to our cause. After a while, reward arrives. True insight develops and when life throws us a curve ball we can see it coming.

In the case of old problems that remain stubbornly indecipherable to our conscious mind, which can be many, resolution with our symptomatic use of props (drink, drugs, gambling, food etc) may seem hopeless and downright preposterous. The mere thought of becoming aware of an unresolved causal problem that has blighted our lives can be so frightening that we resist change and continue to use props to reduce its presence. After a while, though, those props lose their power as blocking devices and our coping strategy scrambles as more props are needed to block effectively. At this time, our body struggles and our mental health suffers. To this end and in order that anxiety can be confronted naturally, our relationship with props needs to be resolved one way or the other, either completely or manageably.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are many aspects of anxiety that enrich our lives like no other feeling.

During a sporting event to which we find ourselves emotionally attached, two sides are locked in battle and we revel in the tension. The atmosphere is palpable. Our hearts pound with the whirlwind of ensuing conflict. The actions of the players are monitored with mounting intensity. We wait for mistakes and hope for miracles. As the clock runs down we bite our nails, secretly meditate or find ourselves asking God for the right result, even if we don’t believe in such a thing. When the final whistle blows, an overwhelming sense of relief washes over us as we climax in our loss of anxiety. The game, fuelled by it, is over and our real problems return to us. In this context, our recreational use of anxiety can be seen as a positive diversionary reward system to alleviate the more predatory anxiety of challenges that require our constant personal supervision (marital status, employment, mental wellbeing, addiction, purposefulness).

The mystery of not knowing the outcome of something defines why we grow vegetables or climb mountains or achieve anything of personal value. We want to enjoy thrills for what they are, and we don’t read the last page of a book first. If we do, the game is indeed over and redundant forever. It’s anxiety that grips us to the road of discovery and it only lets go when the game’s over.

Anxiety is the food of love. We wait anxiously for our amour, watching the door swing open again and again for beauty to walk in. Until our anxiety is satisfied, stories zing through the mind, imagining terrible scenario after ridiculous scenario, and when we finally see their face and our eyes meet, that anxiety is satiated and rewarded with tingles that run uncontrollably through the body.

Anxiety keeps the love alive. When those moments no longer exist we begin to question the strength of a bond and our place in it. But again, anxiety rules the roost. Fight or flight, our response to it determines our quest for love.

Anxiety is the food of life, too. In work, we rely on it to complete a task satisfactorily, but only when a customer shows signs of our own satisfaction can we expect to be rewarded. Without anxiety toil is meaningless.

In summary, resolution with anxiety is an inside job. Only we can process our own thoughts and conduct a response to a perceived threat. External forces like group therapy, personal training and psychotherapy can be helpful as a timely intervention and for guidance. They can offer new ways of tackling old problems but only we can implement the changes.

While a state of depression is reliant on a low self-image, a state of anxiety depends on a low view of the world around us and our place in it.

These are fearful times. In the last ten years, austerity (a classy word for recession ad infinitum) has depleted our resources and wreaked havoc on the vulnerable while keeping those at the top well heeled. The zero-hours contract has reduced the working class to a wilting underclass and the middle class are now the deskbound working class. The main agent in cementing these and many other very real fears to this vast and varied audience is the media, a cauldron of division and distraction. Globalism as a peaceable coming-together has backfired into a potential third world war and consumer waste is killing life in the sea, then there’s global warming and the old European problem. Even when human endeavour is considered, our relationship with the world is now so shameful that we pity the young for inheriting the mess we will leave to them.

Mental health hospitals and units are being sold off at an alarming rate as budgets are strangled on the austerity ticket. Self-medication, by hook or by crook, has become the lifestyle of choice for many, including me, and that’s why Anxiety is my Word of The Year for 2018.

Happy holidays!