Hence, fear sharpens the senses and prepares us for a flight or fight reaction, while anxiety, given its unknown cause, paralyzes the senses, inhibits action, and leaves us oblivious as to how to diminish our discomfort.īecause of the disorientation involved, coping with severe anxiety is an agonizing experience. The source of our fears can usually be localized, but anxiety, in the words of Rollo May, “attacks us from all sides at once”. Anxiety, on the other hand, consists in the feeling of being threatened yet unable to know from where the danger arises. Fear is usually triggered by a threat which is known to us and located in some external object or situation. However, the types of threat which triggers these emotions differ.
In order to understand anxiety it is helpful to contrast it with fear, both of which are emotional responses to perceived threats. In this video we will attempt to shed some light on the problem of anxiety by turning to the ideas of the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. “There is no question that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would cast a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.” ( Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis) Those who have spent time studying this emotion, however, have realized that the role anxiety plays in our lives is not so cut and dry. Most are of the opinion that anxiety is an emotional state that offers no positive value, and thus many attempt to alleviate their anxious feelings through frantic activity, stimulating distractions, or a concoction of pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. Anxiety disorders are the most common psychological ailment today, yet even for those not suffering from a disorder, mild feelings of anxiety often linger in the background for the greater part of one’s day. Auden’s 1947 poem “The Age of Anxiety” is surely one of the more apt phrases to capture the spirit of the times. “Just as a physician might say that there is very likely not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say there is not one single living human being who does not…secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself…an anxiety he cannot explain.” ( Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death) The following is a transcript of this video.
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