Living with Anxiety in a World of Chaos

About this time last November I shared on Facebook an open letter about my battle with major depression. What I didn't also mention at the time were my related struggles with anxiety. For those who may be unaware, depression and anxiety are highly comorbid. While I wouldn't consider myself to have an anxiety disorder, my bouts of anxiety can be sufficiently disruptive to my mental health that I'd like to briefly discuss them. This is in light of previously vowing to myself to always be open about my experiences with my ill mental health, with an added motivation of helping myself and others in the same situation cope better.

In particular, though, the reason for this post stems from a train of thoughts that I've been having recently: that of living with anxiety in a world of chaos. What I mean by a world of chaos is a world or a reality that is inherently unpredictable. Or, one in which we cannot control future events. Control, or rather the lack thereof, is what I would consider to be one principal driver of anxiety. If we could have things our way, I believe we who suffer from anxiety would have our hand on every lever, our hand on every string that controls the chaos of the world. I think this is how we see it, how we wish we could steer things so that we would never have to feel again the second-guessing, the guilt, the pacing heart and the loss of ability to focus that we feel.

The world is replete with chaos. And I don't just mean the daily tragedy, catastrophe or cataclysm. I also mean the events, however small, that blindside us. You know, the ones that really hit us when we least expect. And really, it's those kinds of instances of chaos that fuel most of the anxiety we feel on a continual basis. But I want to emphasise this concept of chaos, because I think it's important to grasp and (eventually) accept if gripped by anxiety.

When it comes to external input or stimuli, the mind is by and large designed to respond in a particular fashion or default to a particular state. That is, it is built to process things based on a predefined set of expectations. And if the input it receives doesn't adhere to these expectations, the mind attempts to correct (either itself or the input) using certain heuristics. There are multitudes of empirical tomes providing evidence for this. The special problem with anxiety is the way in which these heuristics overwhelm or disrupt our well-being. In a logical and rational world we would react to what are sometimes just inconveniences, misunderstandings or failures in communication in a logical and rational manner. Or if we lived in a world where we could predict and control events we would never have to feel the dread and loss of certainty of outcomes. But this is not our reality. We exist on a plane dominated by chaos. And that leads to ongoing discord in those prone to anxiety.

Finally, for introverts like myself, I think anxiety has a uniquely strong effect. A key feature of our personalities is that we do a lot of thinking; we live in our heads. Add to that mix a propensity to worry about and perseverate on the most illogical and intrinsically meaningless of thoughts or events and you have yourself opportune conditions for anxiety to thrive. Our mode of being is so inwardly oriented that we are especially sensitive to the chaos that originates from the external world. And if you are an introvert who values above all else control over your own life, then it seems only natural, given the laws of entropy that govern reality, that we succumb to anxiety.

M.M. — 24-Jul-2016