The Three Ways People Cope With Anxiety
These are three unconscious mechanisms people use for dealing with anxious thoughts
Anxiety is a general feeling of apprehension or worry. If fear were an acute illness, anxiety would be the chronic version of it. It’s typically not as intense as fear, but it is a dull, constant form of it. It’s the lingering nervous energy in the back of our mind that’s continuously needling us with some concern or another.
It manifests to different degrees of intensity in each person, but usually has the same basic qualities. People tend to be anxious around issues of self-esteem: wondering if they’re good enough, well-received, living life to the fullest, etc. We also tend to worry about vague and distant threats, like the possibility of insolvency, of ending up alone, of suffering injury or illness (though we’re in no active danger), and so on.
Obviously, this state of emotional unease is accompanied by fundamentally unhappy thoughts that can be uncomfortable, or even unbearable, depending on the severity. However, in my writings on psychology, I have always attributed an outsized portion of positive human behaviors to the emotion that is anxiety.
That nagging stressor is a key motivator in the life of all the most active societal change agents. The…
