Anxious Much?

Do you ever get that feeling where your stomach is in knots, and you keep it clenched out of fear? But that fear lasts for hours upon hours? That feeling where you can actually feel your heart rate quicken?  When you are thinking negatively too much to the point where you are physically sick? Where your heart aches and the only thing that will stop it is screaming? Where your palms sweat and your chest caves in, and all you want is that feeling to go away? Do you ever get that? Well if you experience any of these things chronically than you are most likely dealing with anxiety. In that case, no one blames you for raiding your medicine cabinet for the Xanax, or something similar that resolves the anxiousness. But do you ever think you want that feeling? That it will calm you, even though it raises your tension levels? That it feels familiar?

Brett Ford of the University of Denver believes that people who experience anxiety feel as though it is familiar to them. In Ford’s experiment, she grouped people who already experience anxiety, people who are chronically angry or annoyed, and joyful people together by having them answer which emotion they experienced most often. Six months after the initial experiment the groups came back and answered what they would prefer to feel. No doubt that the joyful people answered that they would prefer feeling happy, but the angry and annoyed people stated that they wanted to feel angry and annoyed. The people who already experience anxiety said they would prefer to feel anxious. This raises the question of people wanting to feel anxious, and are they really just drawn to it due to familiarity?

Maya Tamir, a professor at Hebrew University, believes that people who experience heavy anxiety before a difficult task usually do better than people who are more relaxed. Due to a series of experiments Tamir has performed on volunteers, she has drawn this conclusion. Does this have anything to do with familiarity as well? You would think that being fearful and anxious all the time would make a person go crazy and want to cease the problem as soon as possible. Perhaps being anxious before something important helps a person focus and end up doing well?

There is no way to tell, but these two experiments have shed some interesting light on the fact that anxiety may do a person more good than it does harm. It is commonly thought that anxiety disorders are a bad thing, and we instinctively show sympathy for the ones who have to live with it. Maybe we will not be so quick to conclusions when there is the possibility that people want, not like, want to feel such emotions, and that they have become addicted to it. Everyone experiences emotions differently, so who is to say what is good for someone else but themselves? It is interesting to see how what was thought all along about the mind and the body’s many reactions to emotions, such as anxiety, can change with one or two well-thought-out experiments.