Occam’s Razor in Mental Health: “Could It All Just Be Anxiety?”
There’s a popular problem-solving principle out there, known as Occam’s razor, that brings an interesting approach to a wide array of perplexing topics, including anxiety.
At its heart, this principle declares that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity,” which, in layman’s terms, means that “the simplest explanation [to a problem] is most likely the right one.”
During my senior year of college, I came to understand this principle, and its application to anxiety, quite well. It had been a long year, filled with much difficulty and angst. There was a whole host of things going on in my life, and I needed help getting through them. As such, I found a psychiatrist near my school and began visiting with him regularly.
During one of our sessions, I vented several of my circumstantial frustrations to him, in an all-over-the-place fashion: “This week was tough. I failed an important exam, I found a strange spot on my leg, and I read about the supposed, upcoming Mayan apocalypse. Doc, what the heck is going on?! Am I not fit for work-life after graduation? Am I dying? And, worse yet, is the world ending?”
After digesting my angst, my therapist collected himself and said something I never would’ve anticipated. “Brian, while any one of those things could be true, what’s most likely is that they’re all just a product of the same source. Specifically, I’d surmise they’re all manifestations of your anxiety — signs that something is not right within.”
When he said this to me, I was dumbfounded. I’d always taken my thoughts at face value, which meant I rarely gave myself a chance to bypass any one of the negative ideas that regularly popped into my mind.
Thus, this moment was a bit of a breakthrough for me, a point at which my entire worldview shifted — and so too did my thinking.
Sure, this learning wouldn’t necessarily rid me of my anxiety once and for all, but it would change how I viewed the thoughts running through my mind.
No longer was every negative thought an assumed reality to me. Now, I saw each thought for what it truly was — another one of my mind’s attempts at getting my attention and telling me that something was wrong, even if that something wasn’t the exact subject of the thought itself.
Thus, without actually coming out and saying it, what my psychiatrist was referring to was this concept of Occam’s razor — the fact that the simple explanation to a problem is, more often than not, the right one.
Sure, having all these negative thoughts could mean I really was doomed for failure, death, and misery, but that concoction of despair was likely too complicated of an explanation. What was more likely to be the answer to (or explanation of) all of those problems was the simpler one: anxiety.
This insight was impactful on two levels. First, the lesson helped alleviate my fears in real-time, since I now realized they were somewhat baseless. Second, it gave me a new tool for combatting personal problems in the future; I could now look at them and ask, “Is what I’m worried about the real problem, or is it just anxiety in disguise, yet again?”
This second benefit was the more powerful one, especially as it pertains to the nature of anxiety, in general. That is, for us anxious folks, it’s painful enough to have to process fearful thoughts at all. What makes that experience even worse, however, is when we actually believe such thoughts, give power to such them, and send ourselves into self-inflicted despair as a result.
If we were to just turn away from these thoughts, we’d save ourselves a lot of that anguish. The problem, however, is that we don’t always give ourselves permission to do so.
Before we can turn away from our constant mental chatter, we need some sort of assurance that doing so is okay. We need confidence that ignoring such thoughts won’t actually harm us.
That’s where that second benefit, and Occam’s razor, in general, really come in. For, by definition, the razor tells us that the simple answer to any problem is likely the correct one. Or, in this case, it tells us that the odds of all of our scary thoughts being true are lower than the odds of said thoughts simply being a product of our anxiety.
Thus, when we apply this principle to our worries, we’re able to step back and say, “Maybe it’s not that I’m actually lazy, incompetent, or any other number of negative things. Maybe it’s not that the world is truly going to hell in a handbasket. Maybe it’s just that I’m anxious, and that said anxiety is what’s truly behind all of these scary thoughts.”
For me, this insight was a total game-changer, one that allowed me to breathe a huge sigh of relief, both at the moment when I learned it, as well as in several other, anxiety-provoking moments to come.
So, with that principle in mind, I invite you to ask yourself, “Could many of the things over which I make myself anxious be explained by this concept of simple commonality?” That is, could they all be linked by the shared theme of generalized anxiety?
Even if it doesn’t fit the bill each and every time, it’s still a wonderful tool for looking at anxiety at large, one that I think will prove extremely useful in your anxiety journey moving forward.
Thanks for reading! Want to learn more anti-anxiety tips?
Then head on over to some of my previous articles on managing anxiety. Here are a couple of the latest ones:
The Worst Part of Anxiety is the Waiting
Three Ways Anxiety Tricks Us and How to Stay Grounded Despite Them
Sources:
Jonathan Schaffer (2015) What Not to Multiply Without Necessity, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 93:4, 644–664, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2014.992447
