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Anxiety in its simplest form is simply a difficulty remaining in the present and a preoccupation with a series of fearful predictions about an imagined future. Anxiety is not only normal, it is to an extent adaptive, alerting us to potential dangers. Mild to moderate amounts of anxiety increase productivity. If you want to understand what life without anxiety looks like read about Odysseus in the land of the lotus eaters or talk to someone who uses a lot of marijuana and suffers from what is euphemistically called “a-motivational syndrome.”
At the other end of the continuum are people who suffer from chronic, debilitating levels of anxiety that profoundly limit their lives and make them miserable. These people may well have something in their neurochemistry that is different and may benefit from medication. However, psychiatry tends to medicalize and pathologized everyday experiences. For example, most of the people who present in my office having self-diagnosed as having generalized anxiety disorder I think of as simply nervous, or more likely, as having significant interpersonal problems, and are far more likely to benefit from psychotherapy than medication. The same is true for the people who present as having social anxiety who are likely to have interpersonal challenges that are more readily helped with therapy than medication. In fact, medication is sometimes counter-productive if prescribed at a dose that diminishes the productive anxiety needed to work on underlying issues.
Anxiety has also become highly gendered in our culture.
Men are socialized to “never let them see you sweat.” Anxiety is stereotypically a feminine experience, and men are taught that to acknowledge feeling anxious to anyone, but particularly to a woman, is to be weak, vulnerable, in a one-down position. Women, on the other hand, are given free-rein to experience their anxiety, and to share it openly.
Another characteristic of anxiety is that it is contagious.
For men, being around women who are anxious often makes them feel more of their own anxiety, which is not only unpleasant but also makes them feel insecure. As a result, men do their best to “take care” of women and “solve” their anxiety in order to protect themselves from feeling more anxious. Women, in turn, are socialized to be more openly anxious with their male partners because it’s often one of the few effective ways of getting some of the emotional attention and caring that they otherwise find difficult to obtain. This often results in a mutually dissatisfying polarization in heterosexual couples in which the woman takes on the role of the anxious person and the man the role of the person responsible for managing his wife’s/partner’s anxiety.
The way out of any polarized relationship pattern is for each person to expand his or her capacity to experience the role they are blocked from. For men, this might involve not working so hard to suppress their partner’s anxiety and allowing themselves to feel more of their own anxiety. For women, this might mean not relying on using anxiety to make a connection with their partners, instead of addressing their frustrations and desire for more emotional connection more directly.
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