500 Words a Week - Anxiety, a Normal Emotion

“Anxiety is not a sign of sickness, a weakness of the mind or an error for which we should always seek a medical solution. It is mostly a hugely reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty, and riskiness of existence.” - Alain De Botton

Anxiety is something we all face, at different levels yes, but something that regularly impacts all of us. It was once something that was a powerful emotion to help us maintain being alive.

Alain De Botton talks about how anxiety is our fundamental state in “The School of Life”, and he presents many reasons for why this is so:

“Because we have insufficient information upon which to make most major life decisions.”

“Because we can imagine so much more than we have and live in ambitious mediatized societies where envy and restless are a constant.” (my favourite)

“Because we still carry in our bones – into the calm of the suburbs – the terrors of the savannah.”

I think we should find some form of solace in knowing we are all somewhat anxious, we are all dealing with our own internal battles.

In understanding this about the person next to us, we know to be more patient, to look beyond quick expressions of frustration or anger and know there is probably something else lurking behind the shadows.

This is what Alain De Botton asks us to do in “The School of Life”. Whatever misgivings someone affords you, or you afford someone else, we must be aware that we are only human. We will stumble, we will fall. We can meditate, sleep 8+ hours but there will be a time when we are frustrated and at angst with the world, and this will slip into our actions.

Yet approaching these moments from a place of understanding, a place of patience, we look to cultivate relationships, not tear anything down. We learn to ask and really mean “how are you?”, we learn how to wrap a sympathetic arm around someone’s shoulder and sometimes without even saying anything reassure them we know what they are experiencing.

“The single most important move is acceptance. There is no need – on top of everything else – to be anxious that we are anxious. The mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we are alive.”

“Anxiety deserves greater dignity. It is not a sign of degeneracy, rather a kind of masterpiece of insight: a justifiable expression of our mysterious participation in a disordered, uncertain world.”

My only counter point to this is when these feelings start become overwhelming, start to become something that causes us to retreat within ourselves and limit our ability to function as we once normally did, in these times we need to look for help.