The Strange Experience of Knowing and Not Knowing
“I know I’m Ok but the hum in my chest won’t stop.”
Many people feel anxious when nothing is wrong and become frustrated when they cannot identify a cause. It’s like there is an argument between their body and their mind.
If there is anything a person experiences that they definitely wants to fix it is having anxiety, but even worse is when there is no cause that they can come up with. It truly can be aggravating. Many people come to therapy talking about how they “cant’ figure it out”, and spend a good amount of time rolling around, looping over ideas and thoughts about why, which just makes the anxiety worse; sometimes that kind of process can lead into depression. And then also, even if they come across a good cause, often it doesn’t do anything to relieve their anxiety.
Anxious when nothing is Wrong: The Mistake of Treating the Body Like a Broken Machine
We like to think that anxiety is a single thing, that it is an expression of some mechanical aspect of a person’s biology that is broken or that is doing something wrong. That assumption might be a little too black-and-white.
I can be helpful to consider that anxiety is not fear, though they are often associated. Or, neither is it stress, again, though they can conflate in a person’s understanding. For sure these states are intertwined and often fluid, but there is also something to say about anxiety being an experience of feeling not in control or not knowing. To understand what is happening can go a long way. There are a few ways where this is sensible.
Fear is fear of something, and stress is simply a word for how the body responds in its environment. Anxiety, like fear and stress, is not in-itself bad. We typically think of and use the word stress to as something bad, like, “my day was so stressful”, or “I feel so stressed” meaning that I am having a difficult time. But when we are, say, riding a motorcycle, or going on a strenuous hike we don’t not typically say or think “that was so stressful” unless something bad happened, like being caught in thick traffic, or cougar appeared.
People regularly use stress and anxiety, and fear and anxiety, interchangeably; often people having trouble with anxiety will search for what they are afraid of, frequently getting caught in loops of bewilderment which tend to aggravate the anxiety and not relieve it. If anxiety does have an object, as when we say, for example, “I am having anxiety over starting this new job”, often enough it is really an apprehension and fear. If anxiety has an object, then it in most cases is not as much an anxiety problem as it is, perhaps, a ‘new part of the life journey’ or ‘insecurity’ issues. More likely I am being imprecise or not accurately discerning what my issues is.
Rather than saying it is not anxiety, though, it is more accurate to say that there are types of experiences that are associated with feeling anxious that we are not being discerning about. If we are not attentive to what is actually happening, anxiety can conflate experience into a ‘one problem’, that anxiety is a ‘one thing’. A “general anxiety” has no object, by definition, it is the quality of existence; the experience of anxiety is less about having anxiety over particular things, and more a failure in discerning aspects of one’s experience. Anxiety is only a problem when it is a problem; the incipient therapeutic question is why is it being experienced as a problem to be solved? It is not a problem because a person has anxiety, the problem is that the person is understanding their experience of anxiety as a problem.
Why Anxiety Is Not Always What We Think It Is
One of the questions I might ask a person who is having troubles around anxiety is how they know it is anxiety. I have never had a person who immediately tells me. More often they pause and ask me what I mean. Such a question does not make immediate sense because most people assume that anxiety is a bad experience that is constituent of traits that everyone knows, and its qualities are listed in the DSM, the reference book of mental disorders. Such a simple question that is seldom asked as an answer ends up so often in a swirling of causes, of why answers instead of what answers. In philosophy we would call this a categorical error, a common experiential mistake of reasoning, very common but not all bad or wrong.
The Map Is Not the Territory
A good metaphorical example around the experiencing of anxiety is mistaking the map for the territory. The map is just a drawing; the territory is the actual terrain and environment. Some 20th century philosophers dealt with this experiential mistake to suggest things about ontology, or the way things Be, or just Being. For example, Gilles Deleuze, especially in collaboration with the psychoanalysis Félix Guattari, used the concept of territorialization to explore how people generally work and stay within various territories of knowledge (I might call them identities), which could be associated with the ‘map’ part of mistake, and avoid recognition of the changing environment around them, which we might say is the territory. Incidentally, they also explored a fair amount about bodies in their philosophy. Another French, and more contemporary, philosopher, Bruno Latour, in his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) asks a different question using an analogy of territory. Namely, how do we go about translating the territory to the map and what must be the case if the map is connected to the territory, since apparently, we are able to make the connection.
The categorical mistake around anxiety can be understood to be involved with its maintenance, and various modes of therapeutic intervention attempt to work within the mistake. Of course, I would not expect that most practitioners who specialize in anxiety treatment would know what I’m talking about if simply because most mental health clinicians are not philosophers —Mental Health Philosophy is trying to break down those categorically faulty walls by sowing that philosophy is not impractical or merely intellectual! Nonetheless, they indeed do function, whether explicitly or implicitly, by addressing the error that is manifesting as a lived experience.
DEEPER into Mental Health Philosophy: Post-post-modern-modernism: The Mistake of Irony; Or, The Ironic Mistake.
What Is Wrong? Or Is Anything Wrong?
People often experience anxiety as something is very wrong and they come to therapy hoping to be fixed. This, of course is very sensible but at the same time often hindering for what they are really wanting to achieve; some of the symptoms they want to relive are: ruminating or spinning or looping in their mind, inability relax, restlessness, irritation, upset stomach, low appetite, shortness of breath or tight chest, being prone to panic. Of course, these are very uncomfortable if not distressing in themselves and their persistence over a time naturally arouses suspicion and concern — which then can become a self-fulfilling cycle which maintains the anxious state.
To make matters even more difficult, we don’t really know what anxiety is. The official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the ‘bible’ of mental disorders, seems to say something about what it is; the official title is General Anxiety Disorder but, as many, many intelligent doctors and interested people have rightly noticed, it doesn’t really tell us what it is. It tells us what people say about it and classifies disorders by, what we call in psychology, its phenomenology. I’m my philosophical work, I discuss deeply the ramifications of phenomenology as being the main approach of psychological sciences. Nonetheless, even what the physical doctors talk about what the body is doing does not really explain what anxiety as a lived experience is, if simply because people experience anxiety every day for a variety of reasons and (1) most of them are not problematic so much that we hear of them, and (2) what people call anxiety does not necessarily conform to any physical state that physicians can identify in a way that is helpful. Indeed, the medication that the physical psychological doctors (psychiatrists, neurologists) have come up with are wrought with potential problems, with increased tolerance and addition at one end, chicken-or-egg problem in the middle once the medications are used routinely by the person, and plain interference in a person’s life, i.e., sedation, on the other end. Further, there is no reason why any physiological state called anxiety should equate to a report of problem from someone. We simply to not have a diagnostic way of determining whether the term people are using (anxiety) is an accurate rendering of what is happening, if they are merely complying with some sort of social meme or socially discursive fashion, if it is perhaps the food they are eating (diet), the social group they are in, or any number of possible states that are not really “anxiety”. Never mind that an explanation and solution that seems to make sense and works for some people doesn’t work for others.
Keep in mind I am not suggesting that people make problems up or that anxiety is not real. Nonetheless, it seems at every turn, when we view anxiety as an indication something is wrong in the sense that it is something we need to fix or correct, either the anxiety is perpetuated or aggravated.
What are we to do?
Mechanical Malfunction or Correct Response?
Another type of categorical error is the mechanical malfunction assessment. As we have already noted, the problematic experience of anxiety is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: at every turn the explanation and answers seem to confirm that anxiousness is the way to respond and feel. But the further conundrum is it does not allow the person to notice this for what it is. Indeed, it is often such a foreign way to view what is happening because the nature of the experience is to try to stop it, to get aways from it, to make it stop, to understand it as an incorrect experience and malfunctioning of something. If it is a mechanical malfunction then it is one that we cannot have access to, since the mechanics are functioning the way it should. And, if we are assessing it is a mechanical malfunction then we are merely expressing the malfunction correctly.
Why Cognitive Problem Solving Often Fails
The most important thing about all this anxiety stuff is that cognition in most cases is not the site of answer. Cognitive problem solving is quite often not the solution for the problem of general anxiety. The philosophy runs deep here; often the most immediate sense of things once our thinking gets going on a problem is to think that thoughts are the main or only things; it seems to every way of thinking about it that thoughts are doing the primary and, really, the only sensible thing. Anxiety is an experiential conundrum because it emphasizes and it narrows the experiential scope so that thinking feels like it will find and have the answer. The experience of being overwhelmed is exactly that thoughts are making the meaning that the way we solve problems is not working, and so our body is malfunctioning. It is a closed interpretive loop which grows tighter and tighter —body pushing and pushing, thinking trying to make its own sense and keep up with the body’s communicating — until overwhelm and even panic.
But there is a caveat which goes to what I mentioned above: if a pure cognitive problem-solving approach does work, then it suggests that there are different things happening that people are just lumping together to call the mental problem of anxiety. This would explain why there are all sorts of interventions for anxiety, why some work for some, and others for others. When we take a moment to notice what is happening in consideration the broadest available knowledge, anxiety is a word for a variety of experiences and causes. Overall, as to effect and explanation, in every case how one is oriented on what is happening makes more sense for effective intervention than the reasons or causes might connote any specifical therapeutic solution to all people suffering general anxiety.
The Body is Not Arguing With You; You are Arguing with Your Body
To many people anxiety means that their body is arguing with them, or to put in another way, the interpretation they are making of their sensual experience is conflicting. This is one reason why many contemporary modes of mental health treatments center on non-diagnostic frames. Modalities like Internal Family Systems and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (both part of my YAM™ Approach) steer away from pathological explanations of mental challenges. Indeed, diagnosis can itself be a reason for internal debate and a reason to disconnect from one’s Self; even if the person agrees with their diagnosis, it might not actually be helping them in the way they hope. Sometimes people in good faith buy into a psychiatrist’s explanation of their situation which keeps them in a lifelong struggle with their ‘disease’ that they might not have had to endure.
I tend to be less argumentative over what is right and wrong; I see diagnoses like doorways into what is actually happening. The various modes we use as clinicians are more ways of facilitating the person in their own process of healing, than various types of theoretical super glue to mend broken dishes. But if it works for a person to feel like they are getting fixed, then that is just part of their process of healing.
Anxiety as a Response to Modern Life.
The conundrum that is anxiety is its symptoms enfold into its causes. On a very deep level, which the thinkers at very beginnings of modern psychological understanding understood, anxiety is a mode of existence, but more specifically, it is the way the body is being involved with the modern world. I believe it was Rollo May, a seminal 20th century Existential psychologist, who said that people who lived before the modern age likely had much more substantial reasons to be anxious than we do now. When we consider this, it really can bring us to wonder what the problem is and what is the solution. It would seem that the ‘deeper existential issues’ of our modern world are more textual meanings than actual anxieties about life and death (actual existential threats). And yet here we are facing these issues with anxiety, so we can say with confidence that anxiety itself is the body’s solution to living in the modern world. In so much as we are experiencing it as a problem, we are really experiencing something quite vital to our lives, and in fact, we might consider that vitality is a feature of the universe and it could be considered to be an opportunity to make contact with the universe itself, to one’s Self as one’s Self, connected. Yet, also noted by at least one philosopher form the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard, the irony located at the root of modern life is what is rejected by the very status of modern living. We are taught to reject life for our modern identity, so when anxiety shows up, we naturally reject it as a source of knowledge and wisdom, run from it instead of confronting it, seek resolution by others (extended Cartesian ‘Objects’) ideas instead of seeing ‘the Other’ (in this case the anxiety itself) as holding the key.
But that is way too deep for most people. Regular people just want it gone. What the philosophy is getting at, though, again, the modern Reason and its cognitive orientation tend to perpetuate the problem and find solutions that create more problems —this is the modern capitalistic way. It is not necessarily wrong, but it might not be effective for what we are wanting.
In short, the nervous system is not opposing the conscious mind but the reverse; the conscious (modern) mind is rejecting the communication from the body. The very experience of anxiety confirms this; it is an experience of “whoa, whoa, whoa…no, no, no… this is terrible, don’t want that!”. People with general anxiety issues tend to withdraw from life in the attempt to mitigate their experience.
Why Logic Often Fails Against Anxiety
In clinical circles, we say the solution is to be able to sit with discomfort; this is the basis of the exposure therapies. In general, treatments for anxiety work to introduce the lived knowledge (experience) that the symptoms of anxiety are opportunities for communication with one’s Self, not acts of sabotage. It is the person’s reaction (not response) to anxiety that is the sabotage.
Oddly, anxiety is, ironically, life affirming. And even more strange (and perhaps a little offensive), it is the road of connection, of one Self, through the modern world, to the universe itself, or as the phenomenologist might say: to authenticity. Regardless, most of us simply will not be able to sit with that kind of discomfort, because, as we mentioned earlier, the symptoms become mixed with the causes, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to convince oneself of the beneficial outcome of the exposure. Logic often fails because the very basis of logic is commandeered by —you guessed it— the body, and logic (as we should know) does not so much point to a set of truths than it merely is a tool that is used by the body to negotiate real means and situate objects and identities. Logic follows the body as the body supports logic; where the modern logic fails is in the orienting on logic as pointing to truths outside of the experience, which again, is a categorical error. We might even say that the more anxious we get, the greater tendency to think that logic points to something truth out side of the experience. Hence: the modern existential dread.
It is the body communicating as cognitions what exactly is happening. But as we said elsewhere, thinking has the ability to think that it is sufficiently separate from the body to be the executive decision maker and sense maker of all sense. The orientation that holds cognitions as semantically and hierarchically superior in matters of sense which then resists this kind of meaning which stems from the body actively communicating knowledge, hold the potential for all mental issues.
Listening Instead of Fighting
I might imagine that many people reading this essay—if they got this far— might be despairing what it is saying, all the problems around how we experience and understand anxiety and all. But really this essay is saying something very simple:
The body holds the key, because the body comes first.
Slowing down occurs when we contact the body first. If we are oriented, or stuck, in our thoughts, our mind tends to stay there to then gather the body’s wisdom and force it, subject it, to what we call in the philosophical world, a priori synthetical judgements. Instead of gaining the knowledge that the body holds for us to solve our issues, we impose upon the body meanings about how things are supposed to be, so the physical sensations fit into meanings and ideas that are already in place.
Philosophically speaking, anxiety is difference denied and rejected.
The Practices of Mental Health Philosophy are based around the reality that when we are oriented in what is happening, we generally calm, center, and relax —we don’t even have to try to relax because by virtue of giving attention to our bodies our thoughts tend to slow and we feel more in control. Becoming curious about the sensations and our thoughts follow the innate wisdom of our bodies; tracking the “hum,” and tension, fast breathing, or activation without immediately trying to eliminate it, oddly enough, very often has the effect of having it dissipate on its own. Our conditions adjust accordingly by repeated realizations that its semantic impositions do not meet the actuality of the situation, as the body informs the mind as to what is happening, what meaning to make of it, and wha to do about it.
Finding Safety Rather Than Proving Safety
Knowing you are safe is cognitive. Feeling safe is embodied. I can know I’m safe, but my body still might still be pumping out gallons of adrenaline, my heart pounding, my thoughts spinning despite the cognitive repetition telling myself I’m Ok. This means that my mind does not have the power to believe itself because the body is in control; oddly, it seems typically we would rather be right than Ok, and we would rather resort, in many cases, to outside substances to get rid of this terrible anxious feeling. They work, yeah, and for a time and to an extent. But after that, often we are back where we were — if the mind could think itself into safety, it is because the body already knew it was safe!
True healing occurs when understanding and experience begin to align, when the mind changes its orientation upon modern propriety and stops its demand for the body’s compliance to its (disembodied) ideas.
Trust is trust in one’s own body.
Relevant Reading
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
May, R. (1950). The meaning of anxiety. Ronald Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety (R. Thomte & A. B. Anderson, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1844)
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2016). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.
Descartes, R. (1998). Discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy (4th ed., D. A. Cress, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. (Original works published 1637/1641)
Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1936)
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.