Anxiety
Anxiety is experienced by all people to a greater or lesser extent. It is a reaction to stress that may be external to the person, internal or things anticipated by the person. It affects behaviour and can affect the body. An alternative term that describes the experience of anxiety is worry. Events such as upcoming exams, being interviewed e.g. for a job, giving evidence in Court, meeting a partner’s family for the first time or having to cope with anything new are likely to cause anxiety. At a purely psychological level the person may find that their thoughts race and they have difficulty relaxing. At a physical level the person’s heart may race, the palms of their hand might become sweaty and they might have a sense of panic. By and large the psychological reactions are cognitive (i.e. to do with thought) and the bodily changes are physical.
Any bodily system can be affected by stress: the person’s stomach may react e.g. with a feeling of nausea or there may be changes in abdominal function perhaps in the form of pain, there may be difficulties breathing, skin conditions can develop, changes in kidney or bladder function can be noted, there may be changes in sensory capacity, in the ability to move or in any of the body’s innumerable other functions. Many people are unaware of the direct link between stress and physical changes that are experienced as ill health.
Some people are anxious by disposition. It is often found that one or both of their biological parents were worriers. Equally other blood relative e.g. grandparents, siblings, cousins and their own children include worriers. Adoptive relatives are not relevant in this regard. Separately from this people may be worried by specific events they encounter. This is situational anxiety and it is usually fairly short lived. The greatest anxiety occurs in those who are worried by disposition who encounter stressful situations. At a purely psychological level if a person has a score of 7 out of 10 for dispositional anxiety and a score of 8 out of 10 for situational anxiety their overall level of anxiety is not 7 + 8 = 15 but 7 x 8 = 56 i.e. there is an interaction between dispositional and situational anxiety that is far greater than the sum of its two parts.
Anxiety can wear people down and they will report this as feeling depressed. There is however an important difference between having depressive symptoms and having a depressive illness. The former is often a reflection of being highly anxious and the latter is a true illness. This is demonstrated by the fact that antidepressant medication is far less effective with problems of anxiety than with depression. Psychological treatment in the form of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for anxiety is of two types. Those who have physical anxiety benefit greatly from relaxation training, those with cognitive anxiety benefit from cognitive therapy in which the person may be asked to identify symptoms that characterise their anxiety. The relative difficulty that each of these symptoms causes is determined by the frequency of occurrence. The three most troublesome symptoms are recorded by the person on a daily basis for 2 weeks, the person is then asked to say “that’s because I’m anxious but I’m in control” each time one of the three key symptoms occurs and to carry on recording the daily frequency of occurrence of the key symptoms for a further two weeks. For the first two weeks the person generalises the skills he or she has acquired by applying the statement “that’s because I’m anxious but I’m in control” to all occurrences of anxiety.
A trial involving over 420 people found that 95% had a statistically significant increase in their level of control over their anxiety symptoms.
A certain level of anxiety is necessary for people to function at all. Too low a level and the person is not motivated, too high a level and the quality of the person’s performance deteriorates.
DJM
April 11
#SDQ
She’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel cold: suddenly noticing that she was shivering in her thin dress, looking down in surprise at the gooseflesh of her bare arms, she got up to pull a sweater out of her bag. Absorbed in her thoughts, she hadn’t looked out of the window for some time. Now she did so, and, to her astonishment, the mountain, which had always seemed the same distance away, on the horizon, were suddenly quite close. They seemed to have advanced to meet her with giant strides while she wasn’t looking, and were right upon her. She looked with amazement at the great dark wooded slopes, slanting up overhead, and felt a stir of excitement.
Her home country being almost all at sea level, she hadn’t seen snow mountains till she came to the south. At first they were no more than a part of her wonderful dream. But, later, when things began to go wrong, she found herself gazing at them for minutes together, watching them in a particular was. It got so that she never forgot the mountains for long. Not that she had any definite thoughts about them. They just seemed to come into her head suddenly, and then she would have to look. It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendor; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man’s hectic world wasn’t the only one – that there were others, where her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow.
So far she new nothing of the mountains, having only looked at their exterior from far away: now suddenly she wanted to know them, to see into their inmost heart. She became inpatient with the ghostly cold forest, that seemed to go on and on, interminable, on those lower slopes: sunless, lifeless, only the spectral grey rocks flitting past in the subaqueous gloom. The engine puffed stolidly upward, letting out a screech now and then. Otherwise, silence; no call of bird or animal in the forest; no voice in the train.
Anna Kavan, A scarcity of love
Only from that day on were the children really felt to belong to the village, and not to be outsiders. Thenceforth they were regarded as natives whom the people had brought back to themselves from the mountain.
Their mother Sanna was now a native of Gschaid too.
The children, however, can never forget the mountain, and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the linden diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.
From ‘Rock Crystal’ by Adalbert Stifter.
Review #1
Below we can see that a weekend's critical moment falls between the hours 6 and 7 on Friday evening, so was decided the course of events over the last two days. A microcosmically complete foreshadowing occurred in this short period, though whether it should have served as warning or invitation is still hard to tell. What is clear is that the pattern was familiar – a coherent addition to weekends past and no doubt future – and in those critical instants the decision to heed or accept, however good or devious my intentions, was utterly arbitrary
Good intentions are, for example, routinely blown out of the window come 4pm. This is when my office indulges in the fuzzy practice of Friday beers. Two hours left on the clock – what harm can it do? On a corporate level, not much; to me personally, plenty. As soon as that first ignorantly-welcome sip touched my lips, I could effectively forget about Saturday's planned trip to the gym, the track I've been failing to make for weeks and, potentially disastrously, a romantic day out with the other half. Two hours later I was in a bar cracking open a bottle of wine, organising a shady rendez-vous with a man by the name of Dirk. The latter took place half-an-hour later and my fate was all but sealed.
Critical moment #1
For me the crucial hours of a weekend actually fall between 6 and 7 on a Friday evening rather than on Saturday or Sunday themselves. It is hard to write this without sounding like a John Lewis advertisement but, in my view, if you get those hours right in their execution your weekend will inevitably be a success. Why? Well, you will have just finished work, you will ideally have no immediate plans and, for those 60 minutes, the possibilities for both that evening, Saturday and Sunday abound. Friday night has not yet begun and Saturday and Sunday seem a great time away. Sometimes the best thought is that you can do nothing now for a long long time. Other times you might drain a pint with friends. Or maybe restaurant with beauty? Good, no?
However, get this hour wrong - perhaps an irritating conversation with an inconsequential or through indecision in the supermarket aisles - and you are fucked.
Maybe I have thought about this for too long which is something I definitely would not recommend. This is because I know this now. I know how important that hour is and, like a man who fluffs his lines on the first day of hustings, I now run the weekly risk of letting the adrenaline rule. Don't let anxiety rule. Don't let the knowledge be too much.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)