Rethinking Anxiety: A New Way to Meet an Old Response
In the animated movie The Croods, Nicolas Cage voices an overprotective prehistoric father doing his best to keep his family alive in a dangerous primitive world. His constant reminder to them: Never not be afraid. And to dissuade his family from entertaining even the slightest idea of venturing beyond their cave, he often recounts the cautionary tale of Krispy Bear:
“Tonight, we’ll hear the story of Krispy Bear. A long time ago this little bear was alive. She was alive because she listened to her father and lived her life in routine and darkness and terror. So she was happy. But Krispy had one terrible problem. She was filled with…curiosity. Yes, and one day, she saw something new and died!”
This exaggerated example illustrates how living a life of constant worry helped our ancestors stay alive. And in a perilous prehistoric context, it’s difficult not to see constant distress as a worthwhile price for survival. But consider how the very same evolutionary wiring sends us into states of worry today, even though our threats look much different. Instead of activating in response to immediate physical danger, anxiety in the modern age often emerges while we are safe in the present, all the while consumed with fears about imagined futures. Think showing up to a dreaded job or waiting to hear back from a potential love interest. These worries can trigger anxiety in us as easily as physical danger once did for our ancestors.
On top of all this, we’ve found new ways to amplify our distress. We worry about worrying and thus entangle ourselves in a struggle with our inner experience. This reaction to a reaction not only intensifies suffering, but also pulls us from the life that is directly in front of us. For those who operate like this, the future is elusive, always somewhere just ahead, dreaded and then arrived at, then replaced by another. This can make the present feel like merely a hallway between one worry and the next.
If our resistance to difficult thoughts and emotions is part of what keeps us trapped in them, then the question becomes how we learn to live alongside them, instead of building our lives around escaping them.
What Three Ancient Traditions Got Right
It turns out this question is not a new one. Long before modern psychology existed, different traditions were already experimenting with ways of living that might reduce unnecessary suffering and help people stay in contact with the present moment.
Buddhism, which traces its origins to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, in ancient India around the 5th century BCE, begins with the recognition that much of human suffering comes from our tendency to cling to certain experiences while resisting others. The Buddha, a title that translates to “the one who woke up,” did not teach that emotional distress could simply be erased from life. Instead, his teachings pointed toward something less obvious: our struggle with what we think and feel often deepens the very suffering we are trying to escape, and draws us into the exhausting project of eliminating emotional pain. But when we loosen our grip on trying to control our inner experience, emotions are allowed to come and go with far less friction.
Like the Buddhists, the Stoics began from a similar insight about human suffering and our tendency to resist how life unfolds. They even went so far as to prepare for hardship in advance. One of their core practices was premeditatio malorum, or negative visualization, the deliberate contemplation of unfortunate events. By imagining these scenarios beforehand, the Stoics believed they could reduce the emotional burden if such events took place. At the core of Stoic practice was the idea that, when unwanted thoughts and feelings were no longer treated as obstacles to living a fulfilling life, they lost much of their power to disrupt life as it unfolded.
Taoism, whose foundational text the Tao Te Ching was written by Lao Tzu around the 6th century BCE, approaches the same problem through the concept of wu wei, often translated as effortless action or non-doing. Taoism often turns to the natural world to express what language struggles to convey, and water is perhaps its clearest example. Water finds the path of least resistance, moving around what it cannot move through, always somehow arriving where it needs to be. To some, this may look like surrender. But working with what is, rather than resisting it, is closer to wisdom than passivity. Because the harder we push against our inner experience, or things of the natural world that refuse to bend, the further we get from where we most want to be.
These three traditions developed worlds apart, across different centuries and cultures, and yet they kept arriving at remarkably similar conclusions. Perhaps because they all discovered that the natural impulse to resist what arises rarely delivered what they had hoped for.
The instinct to fight painful inner experiences is often what keeps people most stuck. But like someone caught in quicksand, the harder they struggle to get free, the deeper they sink.
If you find yourself often caught in the struggle with your own thoughts or feelings, this is something I work with both in-person in Jersey City and virtually across New Jersey. I invite you to get in touch if you'd like to explore working together.
