The useful vibration; turning anxiety into action
Covid-19 has triggered a collective anxiety that has provided huge momentum for a global crisis response. This moment of peak anxiety might just help us tune into the bigger existential threats we can’t afford to ignore.
Anxiety is a cousin of horror, fear and disgust but it’s not the same beast. It is more of a frequency, a destabilizing and disorienting vibration. It reverberates in mental patterns, through the physical body and bounces back from the world beyond in a confounding looping drone. Anxiety might be noisy but it’s not completely ‘irrational’ or fantasy. It’s well understood by psychologists that anxiety is an extension of a vital evolutionary mechanism which protects us from threat — our inbuilt fight or flight response. Chronic anxiety sufferers experience this mechanism like a vibration that heightens awareness, and over-stimulates the senses until it becomes difficult to discern actual threats from false alarm.
Although for Europeans and North Americans, recent years have been widely proclaimed by historians and statisticians to be the safest in history (as with all things, safety is not equally distributed), the past decade and our youngest generations have been increasingly anxious and depressed. This is thought to be down to over-stimulation, hyper-connectivity and pressure to communicate the best version of yourself to an unnatural number of social connections. Our networked way of life extends and heightens anxious vibrations as much as it opens up new possible outcomes for our life paths.
But, some of this anxiety is alertness to real existential threats. And many of the pacifying narratives of social mobility and economic stability are revealing themselves through climate data, an unprecedented refugee crisis and a global disease pandemic to be overstated and perhaps only thinly protective.
Anxiety can be a positive energy. In Camilla Pang’s beautiful book Explaining Humans, she writes that “anxiety is helpful, acting as a lens through which to simulate any number of different potential paths”, this “simulating” process due to its often unwelcome intensity and timing can be debilitating, but consciously channeled it can give us an advantage, through what Pang talks about as the “ability to scan the landscape, as well as the momentum to learn more”.
In the Covid-19 pandemic we are seeing a truly radical response to threat, even from those countries that have lagged. The threat trigger being so close and steeply impactful that we’re collectively tuning into the same anxiety frequency. And the bandwidth of emotional responses spans from noise-cancelling denial through to clear scenario planning or deafening freak-out. But on balance we have been forced to think through possible and probable outcomes and moderate our behaviours and decisions accordingly. This collective-response to anxiety is driven by love as much as fear — a choice to protect who we really care about at the cost of economic growth and freedom of movement. In this moment love is showing itself to be a strong filter for the productive channeling of anxiety.
Climate scientists have made it clear that the environmental scenarios we face are far more devastating to human life than this pandemic. But the qualitative experience of the threat triggers are so different they can’t adequately be compared. The way we demonstrate threat from climate change is often too catastrophic or too far from home for anxiety to be usefully channeled. Or we feel dumbfounded and alienated when economies and cultures plow-on regardless of clear warning signals to change path. We haven’t yet tuned into the frequency of a helpful, collective-anxiety to give us momentum and make the threats we really need to perceive, lucid and loud.
Every moment offers us potential pathways through and forward. Each pathway leading to potential scenarios that we have varying chances of reaching or avoiding. With Covid-19 seemingly immovable objects like industry, air travel and even social behaviours have been able to pivot, adapt and re-invent overnight. Every culture has demonstrated its own way through, its own pace of change and its own way of grieving and mythologising. But everyone everywhere has in some way responded and committed by redesigning everyday life to save the ones we love, to avoid the worst case scenario and arrive at the best outcome possible. I hope that this energy and this commitment to rapid change we’re seeing today is carried forward as we ‘normalise’. How can we simulate scenarios and pathways to help us make a plan for the future, turning our collective climate anxiety into positive momentum? In everything we make, every innovation we spark, every message we communicate we should feel a vibration of useful anxiety that pushes us to reflect on the path we’re choosing, and to assess the risk of harm to that which we love.
