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Recently, a friend celebrating a milestone birthday (one signaling that the second half of life was upon her) announced that her new goal was to stop feeling so anxious about everything, and instead to have fun—to make her life “an adventure.” She asked for my advice on how to do that. I told her about something that the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified back in the 19th century as “an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition.” He regarded this as “the most important thing” in life.
Was he talking about climbing Mount Everest or running a marathon—or whatever feat equated to those adventurous things in the 1840s? No: Kierkegaard was referring to anxiety itself. He believed that understanding and using one’s anxiety was the great opportunity and adventure of life.
That might sound like a very strange proposition today, in light of the fact that, as my Atlantic colleague Scott Stossel—the author of My Age of Anxiety—has written, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in America today, affecting more than 40 million adults at any given time (and far more women than men). Anxiety seems to most people a scourge, not an opportunity: something to eliminate if at all possible. But for my friend, as for most of us, Kierkegaard was right. Within healthy boundaries and when properly managed, anxiety is an integral part of life that can afford learning, raise performance, and even make life an adventure.
Although people talk a lot about anxiety, the state of being anxious can be hard for people to define, and especially to distinguish from such similar conditions as fear, worry, or stress. One way to understand how these conditions combine, based on what I’ve previously written in this column, might be to recognize that anxiety is an unfocused form of fear characterized by recursive negative thoughts (worries) and physiological manifestations (stress). Evolutionary biologists do not regard anxiety as a glitch in the human neural and perceptual systems; on the contrary, it is clearly part of an alarm system that helps keep potential hazards from turning into actual harm.
Chronic anxiety, however, can become a maladaptation. If this alarm system is set with too low a threshold, like a smoke detector that goes off in your house every time you cook, then its sensitivity is a problem. Everyday stimuli—such as, say, going to a party or talking in front of a few other people—shouldn’t make you anxious; if it does, then you could be experiencing dysregulation. You would not be alone. As researchers have documented, the incidence of anxiety as a disorder—meaning that it significantly interferes with one’s functioning and quality of life—has risen across the population. This is especially visible among adolescents and young adults: From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds in the United States diagnosed with an anxiety disorder nearly doubled, to about 15 percent. More recently, younger cohorts have been hurting, too: Among children and adolescents during the coronavirus pandemic, the rate doubled to more than 20 percent.
No absolute consensus about the cause of these increases exists, but considerable evidence points to the rise of social media. According to the American Psychological Association, the average American teenager spends nearly five hours a day on these platforms. As scholars in 2017 showed, the risk of anxiety as a disorder rises with the amount of time a person spends on social media. This risk factor was exacerbated during the pandemic lockdowns, likely by loneliness, money worries, reduced physical activity, and domestic strife.
Excessive anxiety imposes both psychological and physical costs. People with chronic anxiety have been found to have high levels of interleukin-6, which can lead to autoimmune disorders and certain cancers. This cytokine protein—a messenger chemical involved in cells’ signaling system—is also associated with coronary heart disease; some researchers assert that highly anxious people face an increased rate of heart attack, one that is comparable to that of smokers.
Given all of this, you might think that anxiety at any level is an unmitigated evil, to be avoided whenever possible and minimized when experienced. But that is not correct.
To begin with, remember that anxiety is protective insofar as it alerts you to potential threats. If you eliminate all anxiety when you’re driving, for example, you may not be sufficiently alert to the dangers of traffic. Anecdotal accounts also attest to some upside to feeling anxious: Even people who experience what is generally regarded as a debilitating level have noted that they derive some emotional benefits from their anxiety. As Stossel notes, anxiety can raise one’s awareness of others, promote empathy, and bring one greater self-knowledge.
How does this all square with a Kierkegaardian adventure? The research on optimal experiences may help with the answer to that question. In 2014, scholars writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology published a study on how a person’s anxiety while performing a task affected “flow,” the intensely rewarding state of absorption and focus originally identified in the 1970s by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The researchers found that flow states in people performing a complex computer task were highest when subjects displayed a moderate level of sympathetic arousal and activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis—when, in other words, they felt some anxiety but were not overwhelmed by it. Perhaps you can relate to feeling fully alive when you’re working within your abilities but are just on the edge of them.
The adventure can be philosophical as well. A study published earlier this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology looked at transformative life experiences that provoked existential anxiety, such as immigration, illness, and even violence. The researcher found that although no one wished to relive these stressful events, they later tended to report various benefits from their exposure to anxiety: They felt freed from limitations imposed by their past life, had a clearer understanding of life’s meaning, and were better able to find authentic direction in their life. Many of those surveyed said that they were in fact grateful for the experience.
Clearly, a disorder that involves dysregulated and debilitating anxiety should not be minimized, but rather treated as a serious medical issue. But anxiety per se is not the enemy; it can even be a friend if understood and managed correctly. Here’s what I told my significant-birthday friend about how to achieve that.
The first step is to accept anxiety as a normal occurrence, not suppress it. This can be very hard if you have spent a lifetime with the assumption that feeling anxious is harming you and needs to be eliminated. And in any case, elimination doesn’t work: Experiments from 2009 found that people instructed to suppress their anxious behaviors felt that their anxiety increased, compared with when they were instructed to accept these feelings. Whether at work or at home, when the alarm goes off and the stress hormones rise, try simply telling yourself, “This is just my brain alerting me to something out of the ordinary.”
Step two is to remember that for an adventure, “out of the ordinary” is exactly what you want, and to reframe anxiety, not as dread but as evidence of an exciting opportunity. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Kevin Majeres has defined anxiety as “adrenaline with a negative frame.” The right objective is not to get rid of the adrenaline, which is a performance-enhancing hormone, but to change the frame. This can be as simple as saying, when something is stressing you out, “This is exciting.”
So this is what I recommended to my friend: “Sure, go have some big, new life experiences to create adventure in your second half of life. But also, deepen your engagement with the life you already have—and focus on the parts that have always freaked you out, such as conflicts in the workplace or at home, worries about your health or the state of the world, and whatever else it is that keeps you up at night.
“Start by fully realizing and accepting these sources of anxiety, one by one. Then reframe each instance as an exciting challenge, not as a black cloud. Envision yourself engaging in a new, energetic way with your spouse; putting together a whole new plan for bettering your health or rebuilding your career; or taking constructive action for a cause that you care about. This positive response is what will turn the source of your anxiety into an adventure—and make you a lot happier to boot.”
My friend asked a follow-up question: “If I take this advice, does it mean I won’t mind my anxiety anymore?” “No,” I said, “you probably still won’t like it.” Anxiety is, in Kierkegaard’s words, the “dizziness of freedom”—the cost of doing the business of being fully alive. You always have to pay that cost, and it is not supposed to feel good. It’s just supposed to be worth it.
The post How to Turn Anxiety Into Adventure appeared first on The Atlantic.
