While I find your solution thought provoking, I am not sure I agree with your conclusions. Suffering from chronic anxiety myself, I know it not to be a cognitive process. My problem is not that I spend effort cogitating on a solution to a non-existent threat, but rather that the constant feeling of dread poisons my everiday existence. False attributions are a typical byproduct of this state: one rarely experiences such feelings without also being compelled to find an explanation as to why they came about, arguably, because in a healthy mind, one would expect that such states of mind would only appear when warranted by an external event. However, the problem with chronic anxiety is that there are no such events. The creation of false narratives prompted by a natural desire for explanation only serves to maintain or magnify the state. In the examples you provided, cases where your solution worked for you, the state of anxiety is in fact prompted by real events, no matter how insignificant they may appear to be, and I would argue that the reaction to them was a normal flight or fight response, albeit one that was maybe exaggerated. In the case of chronic anxiety, I believe attribution is to be avoided rather than encouraged. Oftentimes you are experiencing dread without any real external triggers whatsoever, providing no readily available, preferably small threat that you can safely attribute it to. In such cases the mind tends to go toward generalized reasons such as job security, health, financial security, self-worth and the like, which really only serve to aggravate the situation, as these are not simple events that are temporally limited or that can be dismissed as insignificant. Transforming an already false attribution of “I am anxious that I will lose my job” into “I am threatened that I will lose my job” serves no purpose, or so it seems, unless it also helps in the realization that there are in fact no actual threats to your continued employment at that precise moment (the value of which would be dubious in any case, as your mind will then wander to find other causes for your feeling of anxiety). Maybe your solution works in cases where an over-exaggerated response to stimuli is the issue, but in cases where anxiety exists without obvious external causes, where false attribution is a bigger problem, I would still think that addressing the false attribution itself by realizing that your mind state has no cause is a safer approach.
I see what you’re saying about false attributions, which seriously exacerbate anxiety, but I’m talking about piecing together the actual series of events that occurred when you became anxious, not the things you subsequently started worrying about. I actually don’t think feelings of chronic anxiety have no proximate cause and come up out of nowhere. Of course no one knows this for sure, but my belief based on the high efficacy of CBT for anxiety, my experience with CBT and Buddhism, and my own introspection is that thoughts are the triggers and sustainers of chronic anxiety. Most people can learn to identify the thoughts that sustain their anxiety and see for themselves that they contain cognitive distortions. Furthermore, I believe that the anxious feelings that call up the thoughts usually do come from some external trigger, however subtle. Being on your commute where you’re normally stressed, someone giving you a confusing look, or having feelings you’re not supposed to have (like jealousy) can be enough to get an anxiety storm going.
For any particular instance of anxiety coming “out of nowhere,” my prior is now that there was an external prompt or trigger. I’m not saying anxiety was a called for reaction (if it ever is), but it was the reaction to something that you perceived as a threat to your safety, status, self-concept, etc. Often the trigger is so small that you don’t consciously notice it, drawn instead by anxiety’s slight of hand to worry about health, safety, all the things you listed.
Maybe the threat reframe doesn’t work for you, but for some reason it does for me. When I ask myself what’s threatening me right now, the answer tends to be more real and immediate than when I ask myself “why am I anxious?” and get a bunch of general reasons that might justify feeling distressed. I think the threat question cuts through a lot of the shame I have at feeling negative feelings towards other people. I believe my anxiety results in large part from wanting to avoid and not to have to acknowledge those feelings. Reminding myself that I’m perceiving my natural feelings and reactions as threats helps to check one of the most common causes of my anxiety.
From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect. I’m sorry for the sloppiness in my language.
With attribution though, I was intending to mean that affects that are triggered by unconscious mental states are often (wrongly) attrubuted to available external events as causes after the fact, rather than the more common meaning of cogitatively attributing some cause to an effect, as a way of explaining (and potentially coming to the wrong explanation). In these cases the real trigger—the unconscious mental state—remains hidden. I never meant to imply there are no triggers at all, just that the trigger is not a readily apparent external cause one tends to attribute it to. Affects indeed do not appear randomly. In pathologic cases of anxiety / depression (and other conditions), this tends to be the prevailing mechanism. Therefore, I also don’t think that you can “follow the chain of causation” in these cases, because elements of it will remain hidden from your conscious access. You can follow the chain of apparent causations though—I imagine this could be a helpful exercise in CBT, but I don’t know much about that.
When you say “I doubt this actually occurs that often”: phenomenally, you may be right, depending on the severity of the case. Pathologically though I am on a different view. Attribution works in such a way that you will rarely have the conscious experience that anxiety is there, but you struggle to find a cause: your mind will latch on to any possible cause available at the time in your environment, such as “a person looking at you sideways”, but it will not be the actual trigger (which will remain hidden in your subconscious). In these cases, causality is backwards.
You can catch misattribution in the act when no events that are susceptible to become causes are readily available—for example, you wake up in the morning and the feeling of dread just “sets in”—your mind will then wander toward future or generalized causes. If many of your mornings are like that, you will after a while inevitably realize that your anxiety is not in fact triggered by some external cause, despite the fact that your mind will readily, albeit falsely, present you with one.
You have mentioned Buddhism, and I agree that it is successful in mitigating anxiety, precisely because your subconscious triggers (“sankharas” in Buddhist parlance) will surface during Vipassana mediataion, and will be linked to a peaceful state of mind through associative habituation. This is a method of dealing with anxiety I have no problems with.
I have to agree that your method can be helpful when there is an external event to which your mind can latch on, where the re-framing you suggest can quicken the realization that the anxiety you experience has no real cause, or—if anxeity was indeed triggered by, and not attributed to the event—that the cause is not significant. If these are the cases you experience most often, then I understand that you find this method helpful. If anyone is in a similar situation, they may also benefit from your suggestions.
However, very much in the vein of agreeing with you that thoughts can trigger and maintain anxiety, I remain in my opinion that when attributions veer toward generalized causes for lack of an available external event, this method would act as a negative reinforcement that would exacerbate, rather than alleviate the problem.
From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect.
That seems surprising to me to read. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323454.php suggests that the word anxiety refers to the normal emotion. Sadness also seems to be a word for an emotion. Worry doesn’t seem to me like a word that points to an emotion but a word that points to a mental process (similarly to how feeling threadened is a mental process).
Depression on the other hand isn’t an emotion but a more permanent state of mind. It’s more similar to anxiety disorder.
Ah, I see. I think our disagreement comes down to experience. I’ve had my share of misattributions, but through practice with CBT and mindfulness, I’m now pretty good at noticing quickly after I experience an anxiety spike. Then I just have to replay the last few minutes, and usually I feel triggered again when I get to the original trigger. I’m not saying this gives me clarity on whatever “underlying issues” may also cause anxiety, but it’s usually immistakable that that event minutes ago triggered the anxiety that started then.
If I don’t realize that some small thing just gave me an uptick in anxiety, that’s when I start misattributing it to big life issues. But if I wasn’t able to identify anxiety spikes quickly and identify the proximate cause with confidence, finding the proximate cause could just be another playground for anxiety.
“Oftentimes you are experiencing dread without any real external triggers whatsoever, providing no readily available, preferably small threat that you can safely attribute it to.”
Again, I doubt this actually occurs that often. My prior is that there is some trigger whatsoever in most cases. Perhaps it is better not to try to find a cause, though, if you think it most likely you’ll turn up something false.
I’m not recommending you try to dispatch with your anxious feelings through (mis)attribution. When I realize something like jealousy is keeping me tense and distressed, usually the real (still unpleasant) feeling comes to the fore and fight-or-flight recedes on its own. But sometimes I realize what’s happening and still feel anxious, just more mindful and not spinning off into false attributions as much. I’m not recommending you seek the relief of an answer to soothe yourself, but rather that you remember that, when you are feeling anxious, your body is preparing you to deal with what it perceives as a threat. With mindful observation, it is often possible to determine what set off anxiety and led to the cascade of imaginary threats. And very often, thinking about the perceived threat consciously cuts it down to size.
The true thing that is threatening you may not be insignificant, and may feel really terrible. But we don’t call it anxiety if someone is having a totally proportional reaction to their problems.
While I find your solution thought provoking, I am not sure I agree with your conclusions. Suffering from chronic anxiety myself, I know it not to be a cognitive process. My problem is not that I spend effort cogitating on a solution to a non-existent threat, but rather that the constant feeling of dread poisons my everiday existence. False attributions are a typical byproduct of this state: one rarely experiences such feelings without also being compelled to find an explanation as to why they came about, arguably, because in a healthy mind, one would expect that such states of mind would only appear when warranted by an external event. However, the problem with chronic anxiety is that there are no such events. The creation of false narratives prompted by a natural desire for explanation only serves to maintain or magnify the state. In the examples you provided, cases where your solution worked for you, the state of anxiety is in fact prompted by real events, no matter how insignificant they may appear to be, and I would argue that the reaction to them was a normal flight or fight response, albeit one that was maybe exaggerated. In the case of chronic anxiety, I believe attribution is to be avoided rather than encouraged. Oftentimes you are experiencing dread without any real external triggers whatsoever, providing no readily available, preferably small threat that you can safely attribute it to. In such cases the mind tends to go toward generalized reasons such as job security, health, financial security, self-worth and the like, which really only serve to aggravate the situation, as these are not simple events that are temporally limited or that can be dismissed as insignificant. Transforming an already false attribution of “I am anxious that I will lose my job” into “I am threatened that I will lose my job” serves no purpose, or so it seems, unless it also helps in the realization that there are in fact no actual threats to your continued employment at that precise moment (the value of which would be dubious in any case, as your mind will then wander to find other causes for your feeling of anxiety). Maybe your solution works in cases where an over-exaggerated response to stimuli is the issue, but in cases where anxiety exists without obvious external causes, where false attribution is a bigger problem, I would still think that addressing the false attribution itself by realizing that your mind state has no cause is a safer approach.
I see what you’re saying about false attributions, which seriously exacerbate anxiety, but I’m talking about piecing together the actual series of events that occurred when you became anxious, not the things you subsequently started worrying about. I actually don’t think feelings of chronic anxiety have no proximate cause and come up out of nowhere. Of course no one knows this for sure, but my belief based on the high efficacy of CBT for anxiety, my experience with CBT and Buddhism, and my own introspection is that thoughts are the triggers and sustainers of chronic anxiety. Most people can learn to identify the thoughts that sustain their anxiety and see for themselves that they contain cognitive distortions. Furthermore, I believe that the anxious feelings that call up the thoughts usually do come from some external trigger, however subtle. Being on your commute where you’re normally stressed, someone giving you a confusing look, or having feelings you’re not supposed to have (like jealousy) can be enough to get an anxiety storm going.
For any particular instance of anxiety coming “out of nowhere,” my prior is now that there was an external prompt or trigger. I’m not saying anxiety was a called for reaction (if it ever is), but it was the reaction to something that you perceived as a threat to your safety, status, self-concept, etc. Often the trigger is so small that you don’t consciously notice it, drawn instead by anxiety’s slight of hand to worry about health, safety, all the things you listed.
Maybe the threat reframe doesn’t work for you, but for some reason it does for me. When I ask myself what’s threatening me right now, the answer tends to be more real and immediate than when I ask myself “why am I anxious?” and get a bunch of general reasons that might justify feeling distressed. I think the threat question cuts through a lot of the shame I have at feeling negative feelings towards other people. I believe my anxiety results in large part from wanting to avoid and not to have to acknowledge those feelings. Reminding myself that I’m perceiving my natural feelings and reactions as threats helps to check one of the most common causes of my anxiety.
From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect. I’m sorry for the sloppiness in my language.
With attribution though, I was intending to mean that affects that are triggered by unconscious mental states are often (wrongly) attrubuted to available external events as causes after the fact, rather than the more common meaning of cogitatively attributing some cause to an effect, as a way of explaining (and potentially coming to the wrong explanation). In these cases the real trigger—the unconscious mental state—remains hidden. I never meant to imply there are no triggers at all, just that the trigger is not a readily apparent external cause one tends to attribute it to. Affects indeed do not appear randomly. In pathologic cases of anxiety / depression (and other conditions), this tends to be the prevailing mechanism. Therefore, I also don’t think that you can “follow the chain of causation” in these cases, because elements of it will remain hidden from your conscious access. You can follow the chain of apparent causations though—I imagine this could be a helpful exercise in CBT, but I don’t know much about that.
When you say “I doubt this actually occurs that often”: phenomenally, you may be right, depending on the severity of the case. Pathologically though I am on a different view. Attribution works in such a way that you will rarely have the conscious experience that anxiety is there, but you struggle to find a cause: your mind will latch on to any possible cause available at the time in your environment, such as “a person looking at you sideways”, but it will not be the actual trigger (which will remain hidden in your subconscious). In these cases, causality is backwards.
You can catch misattribution in the act when no events that are susceptible to become causes are readily available—for example, you wake up in the morning and the feeling of dread just “sets in”—your mind will then wander toward future or generalized causes. If many of your mornings are like that, you will after a while inevitably realize that your anxiety is not in fact triggered by some external cause, despite the fact that your mind will readily, albeit falsely, present you with one.
You have mentioned Buddhism, and I agree that it is successful in mitigating anxiety, precisely because your subconscious triggers (“sankharas” in Buddhist parlance) will surface during Vipassana mediataion, and will be linked to a peaceful state of mind through associative habituation. This is a method of dealing with anxiety I have no problems with.
I have to agree that your method can be helpful when there is an external event to which your mind can latch on, where the re-framing you suggest can quicken the realization that the anxiety you experience has no real cause, or—if anxeity was indeed triggered by, and not attributed to the event—that the cause is not significant. If these are the cases you experience most often, then I understand that you find this method helpful. If anyone is in a similar situation, they may also benefit from your suggestions.
However, very much in the vein of agreeing with you that thoughts can trigger and maintain anxiety, I remain in my opinion that when attributions veer toward generalized causes for lack of an available external event, this method would act as a negative reinforcement that would exacerbate, rather than alleviate the problem.
That seems surprising to me to read. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323454.php suggests that the word anxiety refers to the normal emotion. Sadness also seems to be a word for an emotion. Worry doesn’t seem to me like a word that points to an emotion but a word that points to a mental process (similarly to how feeling threadened is a mental process).
Depression on the other hand isn’t an emotion but a more permanent state of mind. It’s more similar to anxiety disorder.
Ah, I see. I think our disagreement comes down to experience. I’ve had my share of misattributions, but through practice with CBT and mindfulness, I’m now pretty good at noticing quickly after I experience an anxiety spike. Then I just have to replay the last few minutes, and usually I feel triggered again when I get to the original trigger. I’m not saying this gives me clarity on whatever “underlying issues” may also cause anxiety, but it’s usually immistakable that that event minutes ago triggered the anxiety that started then.
If I don’t realize that some small thing just gave me an uptick in anxiety, that’s when I start misattributing it to big life issues. But if I wasn’t able to identify anxiety spikes quickly and identify the proximate cause with confidence, finding the proximate cause could just be another playground for anxiety.
“Oftentimes you are experiencing dread without any real external triggers whatsoever, providing no readily available, preferably small threat that you can safely attribute it to.”
Again, I doubt this actually occurs that often. My prior is that there is some trigger whatsoever in most cases. Perhaps it is better not to try to find a cause, though, if you think it most likely you’ll turn up something false.
I’m not recommending you try to dispatch with your anxious feelings through (mis)attribution. When I realize something like jealousy is keeping me tense and distressed, usually the real (still unpleasant) feeling comes to the fore and fight-or-flight recedes on its own. But sometimes I realize what’s happening and still feel anxious, just more mindful and not spinning off into false attributions as much. I’m not recommending you seek the relief of an answer to soothe yourself, but rather that you remember that, when you are feeling anxious, your body is preparing you to deal with what it perceives as a threat. With mindful observation, it is often possible to determine what set off anxiety and led to the cascade of imaginary threats. And very often, thinking about the perceived threat consciously cuts it down to size.
The true thing that is threatening you may not be insignificant, and may feel really terrible. But we don’t call it anxiety if someone is having a totally proportional reaction to their problems.