A Life Without Anxiety: Impossible and Undesirable

A life without anxiety is impossible and would be meaningless even if it were possible.

I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life. If there’s not something immediate to worry about—a trip abroad, a friend who hasn’t replied, a social event, a deadline—then my subconscious hunts for something more remote. At times, I’ve caught myself worrying about imaginary burglars, gas explosions, or hypothetical future wars.

When we feel any kind of discomfort, our natural inclination is to try to remove the particular cause, like changing a piece of clothing that’s causing an itch. All my life, I’ve worked to remove individual “causes” of my anxiety. When I travel, I over-prepare, often taking a whole folder of paperwork in case I get detained at the border (I never have been). When I have a commitment I’m anxious about, I either shut it out of my mind or endlessly obsess over every detail of it.

None of this ever works. Until I have certainty—until I arrive at my destination, until the person replies, until the commitment is fulfilled—the worrying persists, no matter what thinking I do about it. I can retrace the same reasoning about why I don’t need to be worrying over and over in my mind, and I’ll relax a little each time I get to the end of that thought process—only for the same level of anxiety to return a short time later. Absurdly, if I do manage to worry less about something, I’ll start worrying that my lack of anxiety will get me into trouble because I won’t be prepared for the risks.

And yet, until now, I never really questioned my implicit premise that the solution to this problem was to address each particular subject of anxiety individually. That changed when I asked myself the question: “What is the ideal situation you’re looking for here?” What would it look like if I never had to worry about these things? Would I be happy if I were guaranteed safe travel and entry to every country, if I could shape the course of all my relationships, if I never needed to worry about fulfilling a commitment?

The answer, clearly, is that I would still worry about something. Until I addressed the underlying cause of my anxiety, then as long as there was anything in my life over and about which I didn’t have complete control and knowledge, I’d still worry. That reminded me of Ayn Rand’s observation that an entity that was completely all-knowing and incapable of being harmed would have nothing to live for—it would have no possibility of endeavoring against resistance to achieve a goal, the essence of life. As long as the root of my anxiety went unaddressed, I was stuck with the reality that my implicit goal of an anxiety-free life meant becoming an impossible kind of entity that couldn’t live even if it could exist.

Psychologist Mark Derian helped me understand that an anxiety-free life isn’t a reasonable goal. Anxiety, he observes, isn’t inherently a bad thing—like any emotion, it’s a reaction that exists for a purpose. As a fact of human existence, there are innumerable things affecting our values that we have little or no control over. Anxiety, when it functions properly, prepares us for dealing with the uncertain. It gets us into a state of alertness proportional to the risk we’re facing.

My problem isn’t the fact I have anxiety—it’s the fact that my anxiety response is not proportionate. My therapist described it as being stuck on too high an intensity. Whereas a healthy anxiety response rises and drops according to the importance and risk level of a threat to our values, mine stays on 100% all the time, hunting for anything to focus on.

Dealing with this situation is a multi-stage process, and I’m only part way through it. Awareness of the problem was the first stage. Then followed a lengthy process of introspection to understand the nature and causes of the problem. After eight months of psychodynamic therapy (essentially therapy that traces the roots of our psychological problems in our past, identifying implicit premises and root causes), I’m now clear on what’s causing it. Although I can’t yet stop the anxiety from happening, I can now see it for what it is, accept it, and sometimes even set it aside for a while. I can see how the things that trigger it today relate to the things that made me anxious as a child.

The next stage is changing the reaction itself. That’s where psychodynamic therapy hits its limits. Many therapists, trained in this and other schools, baulk at the idea of trying to change emotions or reactions—they regard them as things to be merely accepted and understood but never evaluated or reshaped. But when our emotions and reactions aren’t doing their job—when they’re hindering, rather than helping, our achievement of our values, including the ultimate value of happiness in life—they need to change.

So I am now transitioning to cognitive behavioral therapy—CBT. From reading Derian, Nathaniel Branden, and others like them, I am convinced that dealing with our psychological issues—and we all have some—requires a more holistic approach than any popular school of psychology offers. We need to spend time understanding ourselves, and we need to take action to make changes once we do. Neither passive self-observation nor seeking to make behavioral changes without understanding the context of those behaviors will work. Both introspection and rehabituation are needed, and although I cannot afford the few therapists who understand and practice the kind of psychodynamic-CBT hybrid Derian promotes, I can combine the two in a linear fashion.

I will write more about the CBT process as I undergo it, but for now, my goal in this article is to stress that a life without anxiety (or any form of pain or discomfort) is not a rational goal. Such a life is impossible and would be meaningless even if it were possible. We need to accept the reality of loss, suffering, and threat in life—and the emotions that properly respond to those things—but we don’t need to accept them running riot in our minds.

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