What is Anxiety?
What is Anxiety? - A definition from a Yoga and Buddhist Psychology point of view
People often say “I’m anxious” or “I have anxiety issues,” but when I ask, “What is Anxiety?” many people hesitate to answer. Per Mayo Clinic, anxiety disorder is to have intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations frequently. And it notes, “the causes of anxiety disorders aren't fully understood. Life experiences such as traumatic events appear to trigger anxiety disorders in people who are already prone to anxiety. Inherited traits also can be a factor.” Does it help?
Then, how would you fix a thing when you don’t know what it is? We may describe the characters, but it is essential to understand what it is and how it works to create meaningful changes. Let’ see how Yogic science and Buddhist psychology explain anxiety.
A definition of Anxiety from a Yogic and Buddhist psychology perspective.
Anxiety means our intellect is on overdrive, fueled by the emotion of fear.
Many yogis explored their minds and described human mind in four primary dimensions: Intellect, Identity, Emotion, and pure awareness. Here the intellect is the reasoning and analytical function of our brain. We can do many things with this intellect. Our modern comforts were possible due to this intellect functioning.
The intellect is often referred to as a cutting tool since it cuts a complex matter into small pieces for us to understand it. But it has limited capacity. We may understand some part of this universe using intellect, but we wouldn’t know the entirety using this intellect. How many variables can you compute in your mind to forecast what will happen tomorrow? Then how many variables exist in this universe? Even a supercomputer cannot calculate all variables in the universe, yet.
Anxiety disorder means you are swinging this sharp cutting tool all day long, cutting yourself and sometimes people around you. The drive of this action is fear. Although 80% of your life is going well and 20% presents challenges, your emotion is saying 100% will fall apart because it is fixated to the 20%.
It is somewhat normal like when you receive eight positive feedback and two areas of improvement, you spend all day long thinking about those two. The issue is that your emotional stability is shallow and the fixation to negatives became so strong. It can be a temporary issue or a longer-term concern, but it drives your intellect to overdrive to do something it cannot do - figuring out the whole world and what will happen exactly.
When this nature of not knowing functions as hopefulness, anticipation, openness to learning, and a sense of adventure, your life will be filled with passion and joy. But when you perceive it with fear, your intellect gets on to an overdrive running, running, and running.
Following the definition, to better play with our anxiety, we can work to slow down the intellect or address the emotions of fear or both. By accepting “not knowing” with emotional stability and shifting the emotional energy to actual actions, our intellect can do what it is designed for.
Are you interested in learning more? More to come.
If you’d like to learn more about the First Aid to burnout and anxiety, check this out.