The Illusion of Anxiety: How the Mind Makes a Person Worry for No Reason
Man and his thoughts about himself and about the world are not the same thing, but the mind considers them as such. Psychologist Amy Johnson reflects on how this illusion has become one of the reasons modern people are too anxious.
Excerpt from Amy Johnson’s Toxic Thoughts. How to stop dwelling on the negative and calm the mind, MIF publishing house.
I learned to worry at an early age.
Mom often worried out loud, but I did not understand that she was worried about things that were not in reality. As a child, this is impossible to understand.
We’re running out of money. We will have to eat only canned soups for dinner. We will lose our home. Dad is going to get custody of me and my sister. In my mind, all these events were completely real, and I’m sure in her mind too. But in fact, they turned out to be fiction. None of this happened.
The things we worry about usually don’t happen because we don’t care about what’s going on in the outside world. Anxiety is the dramatic stories and images created by the imagination that we confuse with reality.
Worry is a natural product of evolution. The brain of modern man is about two hundred thousand years old, that is, he learned to survive in the conditions that surrounded our ancestors 200 thousand years ago. Then the chances of survival at best were few. Man was threatened by such physical dangers as hunger, predators, atmospheric phenomena, which required constant vigilance from him. When a person experienced fear 200 thousand years ago, it served him as an adaptive reaction, warning of the danger of a direct physical threat.
For protection, it was necessary to take a clear and obvious action, and as soon as a person performed this action, the fear came to naught. Scientists call these conditions an immediate payoff environment because you get immediate benefit from your actions (Martin, 1999). The ancestors of modern man at one moment followed their innate instincts and the next moment were instantly rewarded in the form of survival.
Our brain has not changed much over the past two hundred thousand years, but the world around us has changed. Today we live in what evolutionary scientists call a delayed returns environment (Leary and Cottrell, 1999). There is little threat to our survival, and most actions, such as working until payday, buying food for tomorrow’s dinner, do not have an immediate effect. These are not matters of life and death, and they are not instantly rewarded. The efforts made will be justified only in the future.
Since the environment has changed much faster than our brain, we experience a slight imbalance. The brain still behaves as if we risk dying of hunger or at any moment we can become the prey of a hyena, even when the refrigerator is full of food, and we see hyenas only in the zoo. Today, our minds also scream in fear, but they almost always do so not in response to real danger. We cannot take lightning-fast action, so the fear that arises does not fade away, as it did in an immediate-give environment. You cannot solve a problem that exists only in the imagination, so there is no relief.
When there is no real threat in front of you, the mind begins to interpret fear differently, imagining that bad things can happen. As we have already seen, as soon as the mind begins to wander in search of imaginary misfortunes, it easily fills in the gaps and answers its own questions. His answers are unreliable, but since the mind hates uncertainty, he still makes predictions without caring about their accuracy. The evolutionarily justified adaptive fear that saved our ancestors’ lives in an immediate payoff environment has now become chronic worry and anxiety about things that don’t really exist in a relatively safe world.
We seem to worry about what is actually happening to us because the mental tales are intertwined with incoming sensory information. Let’s imagine that my mother one day saw the balance on the account on the receipt from the bank. The numbers on the receipt are an objective thing from the outside world that her mind has perceived. But literally everything the mind has been doing since then has been a creative process aimed at finding meaning and certainty. In an instant, he calculated the increase in current expenses or imagined how the amount in the account disappears and never grows again. Starting from a zero balance (which existed only in the imagination), the mind creatively thought out the following stages - for example, we do not have enough money for food and clothes, our house is taken away. Since the mind loves to give meaning to what is happening and associate it with us,
We embark on a mental journey as the mind entangles us with detailed and emotional stories. Without having time to come to her senses, mother already saw how we live under the bridge, eat canned food, wear clothes from someone else’s shoulder, and did not even suspect that all this was the fruit of her imagination. This seemed to be the inevitable reality.
Considering her mental state and her naive belief that the heavy, terrible feelings painted before her were not fiction, but facts, she thought that, most likely, her worries would be justified.
The mind creates our reality and then says, “I didn’t do it.” He cites what he believes to be evidence and announces: “This figure is real! Look, it’s written in black and white! In a frightened state, we, without hesitation, accept these worries as the truth.
When your visions come true in the outside world - as if my mother and sister and I lost our house and ended up under a bridge - it is not because the mind knew everything in advance. Life unfolds from moment to moment – there is no future. There is only the mind that is inventing stories and images right now and projecting them onto what is “ahead”, the “future”.
“Ahead” and “future” are not real things, but mind-created concepts. These are thoughts.
By the time I was six, I had already learned first-class worry. For years, I imagined my mother dying in a road accident. Every time she left us with the nanny for the evening, I was sure that she would never return. I forced myself to stay awake until the garage door opened and headlights shone in my room window.
I was worried about how my loved ones were feeling, worried about animals, friends and grades at school. I was worried about my health. Does it happen that children of my age are found to have tumors in the brain?
The mind turned to these topics so often that over time they turned into white noise - in the same way I got used to not noticing the rumble of a train that rushed past my windows. While I didn’t always hear my anxieties as conscious thoughts, I did feel them. I experienced anxiety in the form of nervous twitches, nausea, headaches, nightmares, and insomnia.
If I knew how feelings are arranged, I would suspect that they replace the truth with imaginary plots. But I didn’t know how feelings work, so physical and emotional anxiety became another cause for concern. The more I worried, the more true and viable my terrible assumptions seemed, the more seriously I took them.
If mom had the necessary knowledge, she would also see in her feelings a clue that this is all a hoax. But she didn’t have the knowledge. The truth is the opposite of these feelings, it is the opposite of what we are told.
Anxiety masquerades as common sense and makes things seem more complex and confusing than they really are. I often hear that some people consider anxiety to be a healthy habit. “I know I’m more worried than I should be,” they say, “but it’s good to be a little worried, isn’t it? This is how I prepare to solve real problems.”
No.
All the activities of the mind are its attempts to help you keep alive. The predisposition to negative thinking and constant assumptions in a broad sense contributed to the survival of the species. But anxiety by itself was not good then, and it is not good today. Anxiety will not prepare you for problem solving because you worry about imaginary problems. Worry is not protection. Quite the contrary, it floods the mind with scary scenarios and grabs all your attention, making it harder to think creatively and use common sense. Anxiety is an alarm signal that is triggered when we are lost in thought.
Preparing in advance is good, but worrying is not. The mind only worries because evolution has made it that way.
