Reclusland

So, a personal example… (continued from here)

A few days after listening to Dr Hyatt’s lecture, I was walking out of the office to lunch, thinking about his glass-nearly-full metaphor.  That is, in what ways do I unknowingly carry around anxiety and tension within me?

I began having a sort of mental conversation with myself, where I debated different potential examples and the various positions one could take on them:  “Oh, I am anxious because I am worried that I am wasting my life in an office job,” yet on the other hand, “it pays well and doesn’t require that you take work home”.   Or: “oh, I am anxious because of bad relationships in my past“, but “you have handled them to the best of your abilities at the time, and it’s not worth beating yourself up over it”…

It’s a favorite game of mine for exploring ideas and situations, but as I watched myself doing it in regards to my anxiety levels, I realized that, really, it’s something I do all the time in pretty much any situation.

I noticed that I spend most of my time imagining different potential fear/anxiety/discomfort producing scenarios that could possibly arise at any given time, whether that’s imagining the outcome of talking to someone at a party, or hearing footsteps coming up behind me when I’m walking home late at night

That is, I’m using my memory/imagination (there’s not much difference, in my opinion, but more on that some other time) to create illusory scenarios where I confront anxiety/fear/suffering, and I do so in order to develop a skill-set for dealing with these things in the future.  The problem is, it doesn’t work.  And the reason is two-fold.

First, and more obvious, is that imagination never lives up to reality, especially when it comes to our emotional responses. We can never react to an imagined scenario as well as we would to a real one, because we simply have too much control over the variables.  Our subconscious will generally take over and steer the scene to a quick resolution, usually one that ends in our favor.

It’s hard enough to maintain fully conscious decision making in a stressful situation in real life. In the imagination, once fight-or-flight potentiality kicks in, your subconscious will easily find a way to change the scenario to your advantage.  It’s basically mental masturbation, and in the end, it’s about as satisfying. We can still work ourselves into a state of anxiousness, but it is response to no real cues, only ones we’ve created based on our own desires at the time.

Second, and more subtle, is that by creating these imaginary anxiety producing scenarios, we believe that we have confronted the problem and will be better able to deal with it in the future.  But, as I just explained, this is simply not true.  No matter how we imagine a scenario, our imagination is not going to match up to a real life encounter.  Because a large part of  anxiety in real life comes from NOT BEING IN CONTROL…

Therefore, whatever false confidence we feel is destroyed as soon as it comes into contact with actual anxiety producing situation, and this produces even more anxiety (the bigger they come, the harder they fall…).  Plus, until we’re aware of this negative feedback-loop, the destruction of our false confidence just leads us to create MORE anxiety-producing thoughts in order to make that false confidence stronger “next time”.

Since we’re gaining no actual confidence here, do we gain anything from all these thought experiments?

Yes.

We’re gaining more anxiety, the subjective experience of anxiety, repeated over and over and over!

By giving attention to it, by feeding it and making it real for a moment, we are also making it a part of the information contained in our history/memory. And THAT is the real source of the anxiety that we carry around with us.

We hold onto the memory of illusory anxiety in order to convince ourselves  that we can better deal with future, real anxiety. And then, when that real anxiety becomes present, our almost full-glass overflows…

So it seems that 90% of anxiety is pretty much an illusion based purely on the mis-use of thought.  And really, I bet we would find that the same is probably true of actual anxiety, once we take the opportunity of experiencing it in real life as a chance to examine its root cause.

I’ll try it out next time I’m at a party (or, the next time I get mugged!), and let you know how it goes. =)

(and an explanation of what this leads to follows here)