So now, as the Corona Chronicles continue, seems like this whole panic is a real picture into the way anxiety works, what anxiety is all about, and you can see it happening on this mass scale.
So we have this invisible force, something we can’t see, and most of us barely understand at all, and even those few who are experts, it’s still kind of mysterious how life works and how a virus works.
There’s this invisible force that is attaching itself to people, and it’s spreading around the world, and as we have these innocent everyday interactions with other people, invisibly, without our knowledge, we have this invisible force can pass between us.
And we know that it’s growing, and we know that it’s spreading everywhere, but we don’t know exactly where it will show up next.
We don’t know how bad it’s gonna be.
We don’t know if it’s all gonna blow over in a few weeks or whether it’s gonna be some grand new plague.
We really have no idea.
And that seems to be what anxiety is all about: having this fear of something that is not well-defined.
It’s this kind of vague creepiness, this feeling that something is not right, or that something will soon become not right.
Something could go wrong at any time.
We don’t know exactly what.
Or maybe that feeling that there’s something coming for us that could strike at any time, but we don’t know exactly when or how.
So we’re really seeing on the grand scale of the whole world the way it seems like anxiety works in a single mind of a person experiencing anxiety.
Just that we don’t know what’s coming, and we’re just in this hyper-alert state of being ready for any number of bad things happening.
And we don’t quite understand this invisible force.
We can’t see it, we can’t predict where it’s going to go next, and we just are really afraid of this vague, nebulous possibility of what might happen.
And as a result, we are attempting to react, and trying to in some way reduce it, but all the measures that we’re taking are only maybes.
They only maybe help.
Now, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do them, because maybe helping is better than definitely not helping, but everything we’re doing, we don’t know- we have no way of measuring how effective it is until later, when we can look back on how everything turned out.
So everything is so vague and unclear that, even if we do everything perfectly according to the best practices, the invisible force still could get to us.
And so, you know, it seems like anxiety really feeds on that possibility.
As long as there’s a possibility of something bad and frightening happening, we can kind of latch onto it and become kind of obsessed with just this possibility that something might go wrong.
And when you can’t completely get rid of that possibility, the anxiety can just keep renewing itself.
I mean, if we could say for sure, you know, for sure yes, for sure no, about a particular fear, then it’s easier to put it into a clear category.
But anxiety feeds on the uncertainty of its category, not really knowing whether- and it’s not like the wild animal charging at us directly, and then we can just have this immediate terror and a flight reaction.
Or the opposite, being a feeling of complete safety where we feel like nothing can go wrong and we’re just sort of perfectly cocooned and protected in the moment.
But anxiety is in this sort of in-between, where we kind of look around and it seems like everything’s normal, and yet we feel like at any time the monster could be showing up.
So I just find it interesting how what we’re seeing now globally reflects this basic idea about the fear of the unknown.
It seems like it’s possible to take the measures, take the protective measures, and simply carry on with those adjustments without, you know, feeling anxiety and continually renewing that anxiety and worry about what might happen.
And yet it seems difficult to do that.
So there’s my question: how do we get past the anxiety and fear of the unknown? It seems like we have to somehow simply accept that anything might happen, it might be out of our control, do what we can, and otherwise simply accept that anything might happen.
So I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about this.
#anxiety #anxietyworld #globalanxiety