There's no such thing as anxiety.
How could anyone say that? The received wisdom is that in these difficult times more and more of us are suffering from feeling anxious; diagnoses are up, prescriptions are up, waiting lists for psychological help are up. Anyone with the temerity to claim anxiety doesn’t exist may well face cancellation. But if you are prepared to be openminded and curious come with me down this long and winding rabbit hole.
We need to start by going back to school. Most of us will have been taught about the parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. While you may or may not have enjoyed the lessons, perhaps like me you did not really understand the full importance and subtlety of what you were learning. In particular, the power of nouns and the way they can shape our understanding of ourselves and our experiences. This includes our understanding of our difficulties.
Nouns are naming words. First and foremost, they describe objects and things in the physical world (concrete nouns). They are also used to name ideas, qualities and states (abstract nouns). Abstract nouns have a seductive, hidden power because we can mistakenly form the impression that the thing described may have a similar reality to objects in the physical world.
Many have alerted us to this seductive power. Take a look at the following quotes.
“The word, ”love” is most often defined as a noun, yet…..we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” “But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do, not just what we feel. It’s a verb not a noun.”?Bell Hooks
“Most cities are nouns. New York is a verb.” J F Kennedy
“I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about “becoming” rather than being”. I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop, and we will not die. But it’s not that way. So why not celebrate verbs” Gregory Orr
“Parenting isn’t a noun but a verb…an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment.” Jodi Picoult
“We are not nouns; we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”?Stephen Fry
All of these quotes encourage us to think about how some abstract nouns can be unhelpful. They can change the way we love; they can imprison us; they can prevent us from seeing our possibilities, and power to think and act in the present. The quotes suggest using verbs focuses us on the importance of acting in the here-and-now. Using nouns can change what is a form of action, or a process into a thing that we come to believe exists outside of ourselves.
If we describe ourselves as ‘anxious’ we are using an adjective to describe how we are feeling or behaving. This has quite a different meaning from saying ‘I have anxiety’, which turns the noun ‘anxiety’ into a thing. We can then too easily think of it as an ‘IT’. It becomes something that happens to us, that is caused by events and circumstance outside our control. It becomes something we suffer from. It appears to be nothing to do with how we are thinking or acting. This unquestioned grammatical shift from verb to noun has huge consequences for all of us.?
In contrast, on this website I offer thought experiments and blogs arguing that ‘feeling anxious’ is something we are doing. If this seems a novel and counterintuitive idea it is only because of how we have come to use the noun ‘anxiety’. However, being anxious is a process. It emerges from our perceptions of the world against a background of what we want and what we don’t want. We are fundamentally interested in how things will turn out for us and those we care about. We therefore want to predict what might happen and guage whether this would be good or bad. These ordinary psychological acts are the building blocks of feeling anxious. We feel anxious when we predict something that we don’t want. It is a process, an act of thinking in a particular way in the moment. We cannot feel anxious unless we are doing these things.
But this is not how ‘anxiety’ is described in the media, on the Internet, in conversations between friends and neighbours, and even between clients and therapists. Anxiety is described as a thing that we suffer from; as something that happens to people, as something that is caused by events and circumstances, as something we have little responsibility for. It has become an independent and mysterious thing with its own life and malevolent force, much like a Covid infection or other disease or illness. On NHS websites you can read that an anxiety disorder can happen to anyone and that its causes are not fully understood. This use of anxiety as a noun has serious consequences for us all. It prevents us from understanding its ordinary psychology. We can easily become scared of it, of what it can do to us. It makes us fearful of what is happening to us and how bad it can become. It disempowers us and encourages us to seek help rather than relying on what we can know from our common sense. Has our use of anxiety as a noun become a modern myth??
Some years ago, I was travelling with a friend to a meeting about our work with a County Police Force. I cannot remember what we were talking about or what I said. My friend turned to me and said, “Is that true or did you make it up?” I jokingly insisted it was both ‘true’ and that I had made it up. Of course, this is nonsense, but it does remind us that what we accept as true depends on what those around us believe in. The idea that many ideas in any culture are socially constructed has been around for many years. More recently, Harari in his excellent book Sapiens has termed these shared beliefs myths and given examples such as liberty, equality, human rights etc.?
Is the current way we use the noun anxiety another such myth? Have we unwittingly turned it into a thing with the power to do things to us. Has it been created by various cultural forces and have we mostly gone along with it without realising its many negative consequences.
In a very real sense, there is no such THING as anxiety. It is not something that exists outside of our thoughts and actions. Just as it would be best to think of love and happiness as verbs it would serve us better to discard ‘anxiety’ as a noun and rely on being anxious as a verb. If we think of love and happiness as verbs or processes, it gives us a quite different focus. It makes us pay attention to our thoughts and actions and our here-and-now active involvement with the heartbeat of our lives.
As a culture are we likely to come to our senses and abandon the idea of anxiety as a THING? Probably not. There are too many vested interests involved, too much money, too many livelihoods at stake. However, as individuals, just as we can think of love and happiness as verbs (things we are doing and thinking), any of us can change the way we think about being anxious. If we can do this thoroughly it will make a huge difference to how we think about our anxious feelings. It will change the way we think about any episodes of feeling highly anxious. It will transform how we regard our so-called anxiety problems.
In my ‘bestselling’ book The Origins of Anxiety I describe all of the very ordinary psychology of feeling anxious. I explain the thinking we can easily do to turn an episode of feeling anxious into an ongoing concern. Then it is one short further step to imprison ourselves with the conclusion we are suffering from an ‘anxiety problem’. All of this is laid out clearly and concisely in common sense non-technical language. It has received many positive reviews (“I cannot recommend the book strongly enough. Accessible, intelligent, challenging and above all potentially life-changing”). Perhaps reassuringly, it has also drawn some criticism from those with an interest in maintaining that ‘anxiety’ is a noun. An IT that can happen to anyone. An It that cannot be fully explained. An IT with the power to grip our minds and leave us no alternative but to seek help. But we each have a choice. Do you think anxiety is a noun or a verb?
Does the same argument apply to many other mental health diagnoses? By a grammatical sleight of hand do they turn active psychological actions/processes into nouns making them sound like conditions we passively suffer from?