Anxiety

While writing the Hon. Brett Kavanaugh post, I thought more about how anxiety impacts our lives. For instance, allow me to provide a few rationalizations like having a graduate degree from the University Michigan, being a former college football player, the author of Bo’s Warriors – Bo Schembechler and the Transformation of Michigan Football, and being a featured guest on Coach Jim Harbaugh’s radio show, in order to identify with the University of Michigan’s football program. Whether I attend a game at the big house or watch on TV, I am in a state of tension, anxiety, or worry especially when the score is close. I am powerless to affect any score change in the game. I can only reduce, but not eliminate my inner uncomfortableness, or helplessness by engaging in rituals like yelling, cheering, booing, clapping, standing, shaking my fists, doing the wave, etc. Unfortunately or fortunately, I continue to put myself in this state every football season. This post briefly addresses anxiety and a few of the ways in which we deal with it. I shall take the liberty and use the terms tension, anxiety, worry, nervous, agitated, scared, obsessing, detox, pressured, concerned, panic, stress, distress and uncomfortableness interchangeably.

Anxiety, consciously or unconsciously plays a significant motivational role in the lives of all of us. Anxiety is experienced as being uncomfortable and we Homo sapiens psychologically attempt to discharge it. Anxiety disrupts the state of homeostasis. With an unbalanced equilibrium, there’s a drive to bring it back to balance, or to a homeostasis state.

We begin life as an infant with physiological drives for food, water, and warmth etc., but we are helpless and dependent in our ability to meet or satisfy the drive. Behaviorally, all we can do is cry and exhibit some form of restlessness. Then, we have a mother or caretaker that satisfies that uncomfortableness and helplessness, let’s say with feeding, to bring us back to a homeostasis state. Over time, hopefully with mother regularity, our drives are satisfied or fulfilled. As a result of introjection and identification mechanisms, we learn to anticipate and associate the fulfillment of our drives with that mother figure. One might speculate that when that consistently happens, we learn and develop a sense of basic trust, or the beginnings of “love” for our mother.

To be continued