Skip to main content

Anxiety

Image
By


Anxiety is a very generous word, so generous that it makes a lot more sense in the plural, anxieties. This is because, like a large umbrella, a load of elements can fit under it.

However, despite its multitude of disturbances and manifestations, anxiety can be traced back to quite simple and predictable stress triggers. In its origins, it is much more visceral and organic than people imagine.

A common trigger, for example, is hunger. You can lose hunger, overeat, stick to a crash diet, all as a neurovegetative expression of stress.

Irritability is another trivial trigger. You are more easily irritated, frustrated, and angry over nothing, cultivating an inner anger, sometimes silent, sometimes explosive.

Loneliness is also an important trigger. It is a complex feeling that includes inadequacy, weakened belonging, nostalgia for everything that has already happened and for everything that cannot happen. It is a mood that can be thoughtful, rueful, self-defeating, filled with neediness and dependence.

Fatigue, finally, is the most common of all triggers. You may notice this mentally with impaired thinking, physically with exhaustion, overwork, and worry. There is also cognitive fatigue, typical of those who need to make successive, objective, and rational decisions at short intervals; and emotional fatigue, typical of people who feel they are experiencing affective stagnation.

These triggers, converting from one into another, mark stress as the primary cause of anxiety. You may be tired or bored and have an increased appetite or become irritable. Likewise, you can lose your appetite when irritated or grieved, feel tired after a frustrating day at work and so on.

From stress to anxiety disorder, there is a gradual aggravation of the frequency and intensity of these triggers, often twisted by a first emotion originating another secondary, irascible, lasting, and marked by anguish. A panic attack, for example, is a symptom of anxiety rather than a simple stress response.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fallacy of Self‑Sufficiency

By
Some people will tell you — quite loudly, usually — that they are enough. They need no one, thank you very much. Entirely self‑made. A closed circuit. I, too, fancied myself an island at one time. A small, sturdy principality of one. I paid my own bills. Made my own tea. I even spoke aloud to myself in the supermarket queue, which was meant to prove something. But late at night, when all the heroic independence had been done for the day, there it was — a sort of homesickness without a forwarding address. You know the feeling. You’re supposedly sovereign, but you still wish someone would knock. Self‑sufficiency is a word that weighs a bit too much. It sounds like an insurance policy or a piece of camping equipment. It promises freedom, but only the kind you can fit in a box. Like eating an entire birthday cake alone — which, I confess, I’ve done. Because the truth (and it arrives, as truths tend to, when you’ve just burned your toast) is that we are made of others. We are es...
2 comments
Read more

The Progressive Misreading of Silence

By
At 5, I entered rooms like a murmur. I was already listening for something behind the noise — something older than voices, softer than footsteps. “He’s such a well-behaved boy,” they said, smiling with relief. But what they mistook for virtue was only quiet intuition. I was not good. I was attuned. At 11, I had mastered the art of presence without weight. I could sit by the window for hours, watching the wind pass through the trees like thought through the body. “He’s quiet,” they would say — gently, but with a trace of discomfort. They couldn’t name the feeling of someone watching without need. At 17, I was called “mature.” But maturity is not a virtue — it is a scar. I had already seen the shape of endings before others saw beginnings. Friends came to me like tide to stone, hoping to be held. I held them, yes — but not always with words. Sometimes silence is the only honest offering. At 24, my stillness no longer charmed. The world asked for brightness, momentum, performa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Research shows that parental warmth shapes our worldview — how might acupuncture offer a reparative experience in adulthood?

By
  It is becoming increasingly clear that our worldview — whether we perceive life as welcoming or hostile — is shaped far more by the emotional bonds of early childhood than by material hardship or environmental risk. A recent study, published in Child Development , revealed that an adult’s sense of safety, beauty, and benevolence in the world is deeply rooted in the warmth received from parental figures — more so than in their exposure to poverty or danger. This finding resonated with me on a personal level. Time and again, I encounter patients in clinical practice who, despite being outwardly successful and high-functioning, carry an abiding sense that the world is cold, fragmented, even threatening. In acupuncture sessions, it is not uncommon to witness how such emotional imprints — stored not only in the mind, but also in the body — manifest as chronic anxiety, diffuse pain, insomnia, or emotional detachment. Through the lens of Chinese medicine, these states reflect imbalances...
Post a Comment
Read more