Navigating Anxiety: Expanding Beyond the Narrowness

According to Forbes Health, about 31% of adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life in the US. Anxiety is defined by Thayer and Lane (2000) as a “state of diffuse arousal following the perception of a real or imagined threat”. This separates it from fear in that fear is an affective state that has a present object, whereas anxiety is diffuse arousal response that has no definite object, and is only perceived as real. This is a subtle difference, but an important one, in that it describes the process by which are own rational projections into the future can turn back on us and create problems.

Anxiety as Narrowness

So what is the nature of anxiety? What causes it and what can we do about it?

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, gives another nuanced perspective on anxiety, calling anxiety “narrowness”, derived from the root word augoustia in Latin. Underneath the narrowness is an emotion that has been constricted, held in. Perls felt that once the emotion is adequately expressed, the constriction releases, the anxiety goes.

He writes:

Emotions are the most important motors of our behavior…every emotion expresses itself in the muscular system…these movements are to be in touch with the world, to be in contact…Any disturbance of this excitement of metabolism will diminish your vitality. If these excitements cannot be transformed into their specific activities but are stagnated, then we have the state called anxiety… you narrow the chest, to go through the narrow path; the heart speeds up…[creating] all these holes in the personality.

-Excerpt From Gestalt Therapy: Verbatim

The lack of transformation of our emotions into expression, therefore, causes stagnation of energy, which creates the state of anxiety.

This perspective is actually backed up by research done by Ananda B. Amstadter, whose paper “Emotion Regulation and Anxiety” suggests that suppression of emotion after the emotion has been experienced (known as a response-focused strategy, focusing on altering the emotional expression after the emotion arises) increases, not decreases, the emotion being experienced. On the other hand, antecedent-focused strategies, or strategies focused on changing the physiological or experiential components of an emotion, such as cognitive reappraisal or mindfulness strategies, are shown to be more effective at decreasing arousal.

Combining Perls’ and Amstadter’s definitions, one could say that the suppression of emotion is one of the main causes of anxiety, because it actually creates a fear of the experienced emotion itself. It is an aversion to the experiences of sadness, fear, anger, etc. The “imagined threat” from the original definition becomes the emotion. It is the “stagnation” that Perls mentions between the expression and the experience of the emotion that, ironically, creates a state of hyperarousal and anxiety.

Giving Anxiety Expression

Perls recommends instead to give our emotions expression somehow, to see them as efforts to be in touch with the world, to touch the fear of it and encounter it rather than run away from it, and allow it to work itself out.

As an example for myself, a few months back, I remember a night after I had had two extremely emotionally draining days at work in a row, and I had a mind-numbing headache that was quite debilitating. In addition to the stressors at work, or perhaps as a co-arising emotion, I was having a great deal of grief and anxiety come up about feeling alone, unsupported, and sensing the loss of some of my relationships. To be going through the stressors without some of my friends’ support was a wake up call that I was truly living a different life than I was before.

Something in me felt that need for expression of this experience. I put my workout clothes on and I went for a run.

I envisioned the entire experience that was going on in my mind and body as I ran: the memories of my relationships, the vicarious trauma from my clients I felt from the past two days, and the massive confusion of living in a world in which I had lost my orientation completely. I ran faster and faster and felt my body’s stress response system activating.

What happened next was hard to describe, but I felt this sensation that the chaos in my life had a space, right here and now, to live and breathe. It had expression. I felt my headache diffuse into the rest of my body, distributing the tension. By the end of the run, I had felt completely emptied out, the tension gone and feeling completely restored.

I think this is what Perls might be speaking about. When our bodies can give expression to our emotions, it is the way we truly are OURSELVES. Anxiety then, is a repression of our true selves, and to give ourselves space to express our emotions is a true expression of our selves. And that, like everything, takes framing it as a daily practice, not as a destination. It is the practice of continually opening when our stories are keeping us closed, moving us from narrowness to a broad receptiveness to the life that is calling to be in touch with us.