Anxiety is a very unpleasant condition. I want to get rid of anxiety, even with the help of drugs. But is it always justified?
experiencing mild anxiety
so light, so airy.
(From a letter to a friend)
Can one term mean not just different, but opposite phenomena? In psychology and medicine, there is such a term – it is anxiety.
There are many situations with an uncertain outcome, where the consequences of what is happening or the results of your own behavior can threaten your well-being or even life. When you understand: you got into a dangerous situation, from which you must urgently look for a way out. At the same time, anxiety naturally arises – after all, there is no certainty that you will find this way out. For example, if you get lost in the forest and night falls. If the air raid signal sounded and it is not known where to run. Or more common anxiety before an exam, when the future depends on successful answers to unknown questions. Anxiety when you go on a date with an important person for you and have no idea what impression you will make on him. There can be an infinite number of examples. The main thing that characterizes all these situations is a strong emotional stress, which manifests itself not only in mental experiences, but also in physiological changes in the body: increased heart rate, vasospasm, increased blood pressure …
I want to get rid of this condition as soon as possible.
But is it always useful to get rid of anxiety, for example, with medication? And does it help achieve the main goal, for example, rescue in a dangerous situation? After all, the listed changes in the body associated with a sense of anxiety are often necessary to mobilize our vital resources to ensure the achievement of the goal – the fight against danger or flight from it. And if you somehow get rid of this state before reaching the goal, it will never be achieved. Having calmed down and relaxed, a person will stop striving for it, and in fact its achievement is really necessary for survival or well-being. What happens – that anxiety itself is bad, and getting rid of it? ..
It is also surprising that even after successfully achieving a goal that is very important for a person, naturally occurring relaxation can lead to negative health consequences. In medicine, so-called achievement depressions and psychosomatic illnesses are known that occur after reaching the final goal, when there is nothing to desire and it seems that you can live for your own pleasure. And there is no more anxiety – until it arises in relation to one’s own health. And then those who developed the disease of achievement can envy those who, in the most difficult conditions of constant tension, tried to survive. It turns out that everything is bad – both anxiety and its absence? ..
Over 100 years ago, Yerkes and Dodson proposed a solution to this paradox. The authors argued that there is an optimal level of emotional stress that helps to overcome obstacles on the way to the goal. If its level is too low or, conversely, goes off scale, it has a bad effect on both achieving the goal and health.
But this approach does not answer a number of questions. For example, neurotic anxiety associated with an internal conflict of motives is harmful both to health and to activity, even at its minimum level. And at the same time, a very strong and prolonged emotional stress that accompanies, even if not successful, but unceasing attempts to resist, does not destroy, but strengthens health. For example, the number of somatic diseases decreased during the Second World War in conditions of general stress and strong emotional tension.
If the point is not the level of anxiety, it remains to be assumed that we are talking about different qualities of anxiety, about different essences of emotional stress. It is necessary to distinguish between mobilizing anxiety, which includes an active search for a way out of a stressful situation, and destructive anxiety, reflecting a refusal to search and leading to surrender. Mobilizing anxiety activates, provides increased attention to all events and readiness to respond to them, try different solutions, consistently checking their effectiveness and not falling into panic and despair in case of failures. It is its sharp decrease after the successful achievement of the goal that can lead to diseases.
Destructive anxiety works in the opposite direction. It causes panicky chaotic behavior that does not help find a way out. Even if by chance a person commits an act that can lead to success, he is not able to evaluate it and learn from it. Destructive anxiety often ends in depression. It occurs in a stressful situation for those who have no experience of struggle and overcoming obstacles. It is destructive and needs to be eliminated with drugs or mental training.
We need to learn from childhood, and subsequently teach our children to always look for a way out – i.e. master the skills of search behavior that prevents the development of destructive anxiety.