Anxiety and Perception

Here's an opinion: anxiety is not a condition, it is not a disease or an illness; you can't catch it, contract it, or inherit it. Anxiety is a combination of transient thoughts and emotions that you produce in response to a given situation. It is a mental process that you recreate from scratch every time you encounter something that triggers your fear, and it only reoccurs because you have unwittingly become an expert at making it reoccur. In describing anxiety as an illness, you would also have to describe joy, excitement, sadness, embarrassment, etc, as illnesses.

This is the first question you have to ask yourself:

IS ANXIETY SOMETHING YOU ARE SUFFERING FROM OR IS IT SOMETHING YOU ARE DOING?

Whenever you walk into a dark room in your house you instinctively reach for the light-switch. Does this mean that you suffer from switching the light on? No, of course it doesn't. You switch the light on because it is a habit. If you are a smoker you might light up a cigarette after every meal. Would you say that you suffer from smoking? Again, it is a habit - and habits, by their very nature, are hard to break. If they weren't, they wouldn't be habits.

We develop habits to make our lives easier; either by bringing us a perceived reward or by protecting us from a perceived danger. I use the word 'perceived' because our perception of any given situation is fundamental to how we feel about it and how we react to it. You may be familiar with the equation E + R = O (Event + Reaction = Outcome). I would extend this to the following:

E + X = P (Event + Experience = Perception)
And

P + R = O (Perception + Reaction = Outcome)

Because we all have our own unique history and life experiences, no two people will ever have the same perception of an event. In fact, the material reality of any situation is completely irrelevant to all but the most scientific of people because it is the individual's perception of the situation that dictates how it will affect their life.

Example 1
Bob is sitting in the pub with his mates watching England playing football. It is a vital World Cup game and Bob has been an avid England fan for as long as he can remember. The score is 2-2 and England have been awarded a penalty in the last minute.

How is Bob reacting?

Well he may be nervous, excited, afraid to look, he might be sweating, shaking, shouting at the screen...

Now let's focus on Bob's wife who has no interest in football whatsoever. She is bored and she is chatting away on her mobile phone to her friend. She is not experiencing any of the emotions or sensations that Bob is going through, even though she is in exactly the same surroundings. The only difference between the two people is their interpretation of the events that surround them - their perceptions.

Example 2
Bob and his wife return home from the pub and find that the babysitter has allowed the children to stay up and watch an old horror film. The children are gripped with anticipation to the point where they are hiding their faces with cushions every time there is a loud noise. The film is very poorly made and the costumes look ridiculous and Bob's wife finds them hilariously funny. She is not going through any of the emotions that the children are going through, despite being in the same situation. Meanwhile, Bob is distraught because England lost the football match and he isn't paying any attention at all to the television. Now we have three very different perceptions of an identical situation.

So you see, our perception is our reality and as far as we are concerned, there is no reality without perception. Even when we are asleep, the images, sounds and feelings we experience in our dreams have a meaning to us; certain voices can wake us whereas others don't. Perceptions shape - and are shaped by - our subconscious minds. There is nothing without perception.

We can think of perception in simpler terms as a set of associated images, sounds and feelings that accompany an object in our thoughts and form a representation - a frame or context for the thought if you like. If I was to stand in front of ten people and say to them, "imagine a box standing on a table," each one of them would have their own mental picture of this situation. Some might imagine a square table and some might imagine a round table. Some might imagine a metal box and some might imagine a cardboard box. And they might also imagine that the table is in an old dark dining room of a stately home or in their office boardroom. Each one, without prompting or instruction, would put the imagined situation into a context that is based on their life experiences. Of course, I could have narrowed down the variation of these contexts by saying, "imagine a red cardboard box standing on an oval pine coffee-table in a light, airy doctor's waiting room," but even then, there would be differences in the imagined size of the box or layout of the room.

It is easy to see from this example that the more detail we have, the less room there is for interpretation - and vice versa - and that the subconscious mind 'fills in the blanks' in order to create a perceived image. This leads us to another factor in the creation of anxiety: the need to fill in the blanks, to be absolutely sure, or to have a complete picture of a given situation.

A person who is agoraphobic is, in all probability, in no more danger when they step out of the door than anyone else, and likewise, a person who encounters health anxiety is, in all probability, in no more danger than someone who doesn't. The only difference is in the perceived danger. (I use the term 'in all probability' because there may be circumstances where either person is in danger but these are nothing to do with anxiety).

So the agoraphobic, on encountering their first agoraphobic experience, perceives a danger and takes action to return home (a perceived safe place) where they eventually calm down. The subconscious mind then builds an association between returning home and no longer being in danger, and this association is enforced each time the action is repeated, forming a habit.

If we were able to rationalise the situation we would see that we are no more likely to succumb to a life-threatening illness out in the street than we are in the house. Obviously we are more comfortable in the house, who wouldn't be? You wouldn't just kick off your shoes and sit down in the street, nobody would. Also, because you feel more comfortable in your surroundings, you are less likely to feel the need to be 'on your guard' and you are more likely to be able to distract yourself from the initial frightening thoughts. So it is actually a combination of several factors that eventually lead to the anxiety abating, not just the act of returning home.

This is where the problem starts; we can't rationalise it. The subconscious mind is very basic in the way it processes information and it isn't capable of rationalising anything. It is very good at storing huge amounts of information: your memories, your personality, your beliefs and your habits, but it is not capable of performing logic, reasoning or rationalisation. And because we don't make a point of noticing and remembering everything that was involved in the process of calming down, the subconscious just links it to the act of returning home.

It is then natural to think that because the act of returning home has 'protected' you in the past, it will continue to do so. You give little credibility to the reality that you were in no danger in the first place and, even if you were, the thing you were worrying about wouldn't cease to be a danger once you were indoors.

So if anxiety is something that you do rather than something that you suffer, what exactly are you doing?
1. You are applying your previous experiences to the situation to form a perception of danger
2. You are telling yourself that this danger was too much for you in the past and will be again
3. You are reverting to habitual behaviour that you believe has protected you in the past
4. You are enforcing your habits by failing to question or challenge the habit

At this point I'd like to make one thing clear: Just because anxiety is something you are doing, rather than something you are suffering, that doesn't mean that you are consciously controlling it, or that you can just turn it off instantly. Don't feel bad about the fact that you are doing it. It is no different from lifting your hand to protect yourself when somebody throws a snowball - you perceive a danger and you react to it in a way that you have learnt to.

So we've established that the habits are formed by the perceived short-term benefits, and subsequent repetition of your evasive action, and, because your subconscious mind is unable to rationalise it, there is no consideration given to the long-term limitations and restrictions that may govern your movements.

- Your subconscious mind is intuitive and it will always go for the option that provides short-term pleasure or immediate safety because it doesn't have the ability to weigh-up a more sensible long-term solution.

- When it comes to a battle between the incomprehensibly vast resources of your subconscious mind and your relatively tiny willpower (part of your conscious mind), your subconscious mind will win

These two principles can be proved by the fact that smokers don't look at the health warnings on cigarette packets and think, "gosh, I'm going to stop doing this because it can kill me!" The habit they have formed and the short-term perceived benefits that they get from having a cigarette far outweigh any long-term benefit of giving up in the subconscious mind.

The bad news in all of this is that it is much more difficult to unlearn something than it is to learn it, especially if you are consciously trying to do it. You can't forget things deliberately. Try it; try to forget about the number 7 now... Impossible isn't it?

The good news is, anything that you can learn, you can learn the direct opposite to counteract it. If you learn that when driving a car you push the gear lever forward for first gear, you can't forget this deliberately but if you then bought a car that had a different gearbox and you had to push the gear lever backwards for first gear, it wouldn't take you long to learn this new habit. You would still have the memory that you used to have to push the gear lever forward but now you don't act on it because you have learnt a new habit.

Moving on from the idea of suffering from anxiety, we take it a stage further and we actually want to 'own' the condition; we use possessive phrases like 'I have anxiety' or 'my agoraphobia'. Again, if you found that you were happy a lot of the time, you would never say "I have happiness". If you went to the pub every night you wouldn't say "I have going to the pub every night." And even worse than this is when we base our whole identity on these processes: we move from saying "I am agoraphobic" to saying "I am an agoraphobic" like it's some kind of separate species.

Of course we start to use these phrases because they are a convenient way of explaining things without going into detail. It is easier to say "I have anxiety" than it is to say "I once found myself in a situation where I didn't know how to cope with a distorted fearful perception and my reaction to that was a perfectly normal human panic response but since then I have got myself into the habit of repeating this panic pattern on a regular basis and I have developed evasive behaviours to protect myself from the perceived danger". Doesn't really trip off the tongue does it? The problem is, once we start to use these convenient terms, we start to accept them as accurate descriptions of ourselves and they shift from describing our behaviour to dictating our behaviour. If a man passes his apprenticeship and becomes a brick-layer, it doesn't mean he has to adapt his life so that he does nothing but lay bricks. Don't let these words of convenience define your behaviour.