Anxiety Is Common To Everyone

People worry about things. It is normal to think about all the items on our to-do lists, or the health of loved ones, or those projects at work. When the worry becomes more intense we may even become fearful. Generally, we are afraid of what might go wrong. A certain amount of stress about these worrisome or frightening situations helps us to focus our energy and take action. We complete a task, offer support to a sick friend, or plan a strategy to meet the deadline for that project. Our worries and fears are situational and temporary. When we take steps to confront them, they don't linger. They may be replaced by another stressful situation, which also leads to action, and then that worry fades. This is a typical cycle for most of us in our fast-paced culture.

Anxiety is a different condition which confronts people from childhood through the retirement years. Rollo May wrote about the contrast between anxiety and fear in his 1983 book titled, The Discovery of Being.

"The understanding of anxiety as ontological illuminates the difference between anxiety and fear. The distinction is not one of degree nor of the intensity of the experience. The anxiety a person feels when someone he respects passes him on the street without speaking, for example, is not as intense as the fear he experiences when the dentist seizes the drill to attack a sensitive tooth. But the gnawing threat of the slight on the street may hound him all day long and torment his dreams at night, whereas the feeling of fear, though it was quantitatively greater, is gone for the time being as soon as he steps out of the dentist's chair. The difference is that the anxiety strikes at the central core of his self-esteem and his sense of value as a self, which is the most important aspect of his experience of himself as a being."

When Dr. May writes about anxiety being ontological he means that it is a state of being or an indication of who we are. By contrast, fear is a temporary emotion that we have and it is not what we are. May and the other existential psychotherapists of the mid to late 20th century recognized that being anxious was part of being human.

Everyone experiences a certain amount of anxiety in her or his life. It is an unavoidable condition. There is variation in how effectively we can live and cope with our own unique sense of anxiety. The next blog posts will focus on where anxiety comes from and how we can manage the experience.

The quote in the post above was taken from page 108 of The Discovery of Being by Rollo May; published in 1983 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.