Anxiety and the Body

Let’s put this in perspective: Sigmund Freud, for all of the brilliance he had as a clinician, went through some convoluted mental acrobatics in terms of theorizing what was taking place in his clinical practice. He was brilliant when working with clients, but in thinking through some of the explanations for what was taking place there, things got a little dicey. What we know at this point is that many parts of Freudian theory don’t hold a lot of water, but incredible revisions are possible in light of developments in linguistics, cognitive science, and the like.

There was one thing he said about anxiety that was pretty significant but easy to be misinterpreted. Freud said that “anxiety is the universal currency of affect.”

Now, that’s a loaded phrase.

How is it that anxiety is this currency that can be exchanged for any emotional state, any feeling whatsoever? Take joy, sadness, fear, rage, any of these things you want, and you can trade them in for anxiety at any time. And in fact, you can get a great exchange rate — you’ll lose nothing on the transaction.

How is it that this comes to be?

By what mechanism do all of these different emotions transform into anxiety?

That’s something we’re going to make some sense of as we make our way through this piece. From the outset it’s really important to understand that complex systems (and you as a biological entity are a complex system) operate through what’s known as cybernetic explanation — that is to say they work through feedback. This is very different from the cause-and-effect of the world of formal logic.

Previously we’ve explored this from the lens of natural selection, but it may be worth a refresher. If you know anything about evolution, you know the phrase “survival of the fittest.” The easy trap to fall into would be to think that this means that the fittest from a population are chosen for survival. However, the exact inverse is more accurate. In this case evolution works by the elimination of the least fit. This is a perfect example of cybernetic explanation in action. Cybernetic explanation works through negative selection — that is to say that it selects against bad options. In the case of evolution in a breeding population, those that aren’t really suitable for the environmental conditions or aren’t suitable mates are selected out of the breeding pool.

In a bit of circular logic, the fittest are the ones that survive, and the ones that survive are the fittest. This circular reasoning is actually a key part of cybernetic explanation. We only know after the fact who the so-called fittest are. They’re only the fittest because they weren’t eliminated as bad options from the breeding population. What I hope that you keep in mind as we continue is that in complex biological systems, the primary mode of operation is the removal of bad options. What remains isn’t only the good options — the good enough (or not bad enough) remain as well.

Now, what does this have to do with anxiety?

Well, let’s circle back to Freud’s idea that anxiety is the universal currency of affect. At any point in your life, at any moment in time, you could take some emotion and exchange it for anxiety. Anxiety isn’t a free lunch, so presumably that emotion is intolerable or unwelcome for whatever reason.

For example, if you’re a boy growing up in the traditional Western masculine world, and you are told that boys don’t cry or you need to man up, then what do you do when you experience this emotion of sadness? If you’re in an environment that deems that emotional experience intolerable, then you’d better do your best to get rid of that intolerable thing.

You can see where the cybernetic pruning comes into play.

What do you do in that scenario? You convert that into anxiety somehow.

Now, how does this happen?

If you were the little boy in that case, and you were both experiencing sadness and unwilling to experience it, what would you do? What specifically would you do within yourself, so as not to cry?

You would do what you do when you do anything that you do throughout your life — you would engage in some sort of muscular contraction. That is to say that you would engage certain muscles within the body to achieve a desired outcome. That’s how we do everything that we do.

If I want to reach for a glass of water, I have to engage in certain muscular contractions relative to the environment in which I’m situated to accomplish that task. If I want to reach out and grab a pencil and write something, I have to engage in a series of muscular contractions to accomplish that desired outcome relative to my environment.

If the desired outcome is not to experience that particular emotion or feeling, then it is enacted through a series of muscular contractions. In this case maybe it’s contractions around the eyes, around the diaphragm, etc. The engagement of musculature for one activity means that it is unavailable for other activities. A person can’t both cry and not cry simultaneously, but a person can rigidify the musculature around the eyes so as not to do anything whatsoever.

In the short term this may be necessary to maintain a sense of security. That’s all well and good. However, when we internalize these particular normative standards or we engage in that set of muscular contractions for long enough, it becomes habitual. It becomes an automatic response.

We develop a conditioned response to contract the eyes, the throat, the diaphragm, whatever the case may be. That’s not so good as a long term strategy.

What I would suggest is that these contractions of musculature are meaning-saturated restrictions of functional capacity as an organism relative to an environment. And that’s a loaded phrase, so let’s see if we can break it down.

What’s “meaning” in this case?

I’ll defer to the biologist and anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, who in an essay called “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art” said that meaning is an approximate synonym of information, pattern, redundancy, and restraint. What’s meaningful to us in our lives is that which helps us find a pattern in our experiences. What’s meaningful in our lives is that which is informative for us. It actually puts us in a form — it shapes us over the course of our lives. What’s meaningful to us helps us recognize some amount of redundancy or order in our lives.

When we’re experiencing these meaning-saturated restrictions, these are related to patterns of organismic behavior relative to the environment. These actually convey information about our historical patterns of relationship to the world around us.

And in terms of redundancy, they’re actually somewhat predictive. If you want to know what shape you’re going to be in 10 years from now, look at the overall body pattern that you exhibit now. And exaggerate that 10 or 20 percent. That’s a really good bet on the shape your body is going to make a decade down the line.

Now that we’ve addressed the meaning-saturated part, let’s turn our attention to the second part of the phrase: a restriction of functional capacity. That’s not insignificant either. Every engagement of your musculature is not just a restriction of that response or that emotion in that situation. Again, when that musculature is engaged, it’s involved in an activity and it’s unavailable for other activity.

If you’re the boy who experienced sadness in response to something in the environment, and you were told “Don’t cry,” then you may engage in an inhibition of the diaphragm.

Can you think of a biological function that’s restricted in that case?

We’ll go figure: it’s your capacity to breathe.

So we can see how that meaning-saturated restriction impedes on functional capacity across a broad set of functions. It’s not just limited to that particular emotional context. This restricts capacity in walking, running, and anything else that requires your ability to exchange air with the environment.

What I propose is that anxiety is the act of restricting. Anxiety isn’t some abstract state. Anxiety is the restriction of those tissues. It is the experience of meaning-saturated restriction of functional capacity.

The moment you begin to constrict and engage those tissues, you’re unavailable for activity in the world around you — at least you’re not as available as you would be otherwise. We could go so far as to say that any engagement of muscular tissue that isn’t accomplishing specific, deliberate (or biologically essential) tasks relative to the environment could be called anxiety.

In this case the stiffness in the back at the end of the day or the bracing through the shoulders and the neck could be an experience of anxiety. What that means is that you have perhaps exchanged some unwanted experience (shame around being perceived of lazy, fear of what others would think of you taking a break, etc) for anxiety.

Coming full circle to Freud, if anxiety is the universal currency of affect, then what we’re looking at here in a biological system is the idea that anxiety is the closing off of certain perceptions, certain states, certain feelings or thoughts.

The word itself, “anxiety,” gives us a bit of a clue. It derives from the Latin ango, angere, which means something to the extent of “to tie,” “to bind,” “to narrow.” And what is it that we’re doing when we’re constricting our musculature unnecessarily? Well, when we’re engaged in those contractions, we are tying. We are binding. We are narrowing ourselves. And when we do that, not only are we reducing our functional capacity relative to the environment, but also narrowing the window of human experience.

Hopefully this gives you some food for thought. All too often we have a tendency to compartmentalize the aspects of our experience, abstracting ourselves into “physical” or “emotional” or “intellectual,” but we’re never anything less than the entirety of our experience moment to moment.

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