Where does anxiety come from? How might you be making your anxiety worse?
According to The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, the main cause of anxiety is insecurity. He further explains what insecurity is, why it makes you anxious, and why trying to resist it can lead to further anxiety.
Let’s take a deeper look at the origins of anxiety.
The Origins of Anxiety
Where does anxiety come from? According to Watts, anxiety comes from insecurity—the state of being impermanent and vulnerable to change. Insecurity is a fundamental quality of existence. He explains that there’s no such thing as security because change is inevitable: One moment passes and is replaced by the next, which means nothing can be frozen in time. Every living thing changes each moment and ultimately transitions from life to death.
(Shortform note: In The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus argues similarly that since death is inevitable and the meaning of life is indeterminable, insecurity is an essential facet of human life. He explains that there’s a mismatch between this reality and our psychological needs—to be well, we need to believe that we exist for a reason and that death isn’t the end of our existence, but we can’t know either of those things for sure. He refers to this paradox between our desire for security and the fact of insecurity as absurdity—and he argues that the only way to deal with it is by embracing absurdity and making the most of our limited time on earth.)
Why Insecurity Makes You Anxious
Watts explains that every human has an animal self and a thinking self. Despite the fundamental insecurity of life, many people continue to hope or strive for security because they identify with their thinking selves over their animal selves. Your animal self has two key qualities: It has sophisticated instincts (for example, hunger cues), and it lives in the moment, always in flux—transitioning from hungry to satiated, for example, or from sleepy to alert, depending on the internal and external sensations it perceives. Your animal self doesn’t think, and it’s never concerned with the past or the future; it simply exists in the here and now and acts according to its internal wisdom rather than any abstract rules.
On the other hand, your thinking self is conscious—it’s able to contemplate, remember, and imagine. It also has time consciousness (a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future). Time consciousness makes you believe that you’re a stable, independent entity—since you share memories with your 10-year-old self, you believe you’re the same person you’ve always been. Your thinking self wants to continue being a stable, independent entity—so it resists change and tries to achieve permanence, even though it can’t.
Since your thinking self wants to become permanent, you become anxious about things that threaten your permanence—namely, painful experiences and death. But Watts explains that pain and death are both necessary and valuable parts of life. He says that pain must accompany pleasure because if you experienced a constant stream of pleasure, you’d eventually become numb to it—or it would hurt you, the way too much alcohol can turn you into an addict. Pain punctuates your experience to make pleasure meaningful and enjoyable. Watts argues similarly that death is a good thing—you’d get tired of living if you lived forever.
How You’re Making Your Anxiety Worse
Watts notes that despite the utility of pain and death, your anxiety about these experiences leads you to pursue an endless stream of pleasure. You know your time on earth is limited and that pleasures aren’t promised, so you want to cram as much pleasure into your life as possible. You probably engage in consumerism—the purchasing of goods and services beyond the bare necessities—to make that happen. Consumerism is a vicious cycle: Experiencing one pleasure makes you desire more and better pleasures (for example, you might always be chasing the high of obtaining the newest, fastest car). As a result, consumerism can never satisfy you. Watts says this means that the more you pursue pleasure, the more anxious you become.
As a consumer, you fixate on the future. When you’re experiencing pain, you try to make yourself happy by diverting your attention from your discomfort to ways you can maximize pleasure in the future. However, Watts says that you’ll never experience the future—you can only ever experience what’s happening in this present moment; in the next moment, you’ll experience what’s happening in that present moment. This means that pursuing a future goal is futile. Also, distracting yourself from the present diminishes your ability to fully experience the present. You won’t fully enjoy any pleasurable experience, so you’ll keep seeking out future pleasures, and you won’t be able to deal with and move on from pain. This extends your anxiety.
Therefore, Watts argues that contrary to popular belief, the inevitability of pain and death isn’t what makes life difficult—what makes life difficult is your insistence on pursuing future pleasures and sparing yourself from future pain and death.
