Anxiety is a natural state and not a mental health issue…

Anxiety is a natural state and not a mental health issue…

People think there is something wrong with you if you get anxious, or generally suffer from anxiety. However Daniel Dennet wrote papers concerning how neurons get bored e.g. when you eat or drink the taste become familiar and then the brain want another taste. Your chosen coffee tastes worse than you second favorite after a while et.
I saw a documentary where neurons were used to drive/direct a small model sized vehicle, the scientists making the experiment noted how neurons were doers, that they, given the chance, will operate anything they can do.
This suggests to me that if you take away the outlet whereby neurons can be active, then they are fizzing away in your brain but with nowhere to go - so to speak. Hence you become anxious.
In fact can’t we say that nervous energy is mostly down to neurons wanting to be active but not in a repetitive way? Have you ever noticed that after a while, when you begin in an anxious state, a simple conversation or activity [both non-repetitive] will make that anxiety fade away.

Entrapment
The major cause of suicide is the emotional state of entrapment, its when you feel for whatever reason that you are trapped e.g. because you have had bad thoughts which you cannot forgive yourself, or others wont forgive.
Tell those things to your doctor or psychologist etc, and instead of there being patient confidentiality they will blow the whole thing up in your face [tell authorities etc]. The very thing most people with this emotional state least want, and the most harmful and quickest way to kill someone. Even the fear of that is enough to cause suicide.
Entrapment then, is a hyper anxious state whereby the sufferer cannot find a way to subsume the neuronal desire to be active, and continually refreshed. The person feels they cannot move forwards or do anything for fear of consequences. So all those anxious neurons just keep getting more and more anxious until the sufferer feels they are about to burst - so to say.

The only way to stop all this worldwide mass suicide, is to get people with mental health issues [most of which aren’t truly that] and who have been through entrapment and other conditions, to be the ones to help. I.e. and not all those medical professionals who haven’t! ok it probably needs them too, but they need to listen, and not judge - fundamentally, yet they cannot do that in a society which will select terms from a collection and stick labels on people causing them to commit suicide. Y’know like what the media does all the time!

_

That would explain why chronic fatigue sufferers suffer from an unexplainable anxiousness… wanting to, but not being able to do, anything… a case of an underactive body creating an overactive mind? until an equilibrium state is achieved… probably why the inclusion of graded exercise is stressed as being an important factor in recovery/climbing out of the self-fuelling illness.

Do you mind if I share your above findings in a private cf Facebook group?

Only to the neurologically ill.

Anxiety is caused by an over-reaction to the possibility of a need to act. It is a subtle type of mind destroying fear. And it is only normal in today’s society because of what people have medically done to the masses in an effort to conquer and control.

Not at all. :slight_smile:

I agree with your first sentiment, with the exception to the second that ‘it is only normal because…’ - I think it is always normal because neurons firing are nervous energy. historically this would be the same.

Most issues in the mental health field are exaggerated instances of otherwise normal mental states. Not all sadness is clinical depression, for example. The differences are often delineated by impaired functioning, intensity, things like that. For some, anxiety can be crippling and prevent them from leaving their home. For others, they just don’t want to do karaoke. And all sorts of other things in between. Plenty of stresses and anxieties are totally fine, but let’s not pretend that it means any anxiety should be encouraged.

Besides, since when has being natural prevented things from being issues? Most diseases are natural. Some are engineered, but still have origins in nature. We still need to help people afflicted with them.

I think you guys couldn’t be more wrong. For instance, some meds cause anxiety, and some meds rush you with more dopamine which causes paranoia and even psychosis. Now what if the brain did these things naturally, like they do to some people. As we get older our brain chemistry changes. As we experience like, for example, PTSD can rewire the mind, our brain doesn’t always react normally. No brain is exactly alike. Are we to say narcolepsy is just a thought process that makes one tired or are there actual problems with brain chemistry? Mental illness gets this wrap that people should just suck it up. I couldn’t agree less. People with schizophrenia suffer from multiple issues most of the time because the illness effects all your chemistry. They are prone to more anxiety, to bipolar, to depression and cognitive decline among the standard delusions and hallucinations from the excess dopamine to the brain. Sometimes switches flip on in the brain after a traumatic experience and or because of a herdetiroy predisposition, and all hell can break loose. My father, after coming home to see his girlfriend dead, was triggered with schizophrenia. Too many people idealize the brain as some shining temple on the hill with classic archietcure and marble, but its mostly fat protein and water and so many things can go wrong in that mixture.

It is indeed a natural state but it is also a mental health issue when it starts to negatively impact upon ones life

Well, that’s exactly right. As with many other things, it’s a matter of degree. When does it cross the line to become a metal affliction? As you state, when it begins to negatively affect one’s life on a chronic basis. Acute anxiety can result in panic attacks and what used to be termed a nervous breakdown.

I agree that anxiety is unhealthy, but I don’t agree that the cause of our anxiety is based on some group of people who want to control us. What we are doing as a culture we are doing to ourselves, we our conspiring against ourselves because we don’t know any better. A few malevolent people at the top of this or that hierarchy don’t have the power to control a population that isn’t already sick and/or wants safety and comfort over freedom and responsibility.

Here, an analogy can be found, in terms of norms,classifications, functions, and other correlative.

The idea of the stress, the angst, the existential anxiety as the sign of the modern times have been long and wide discussed, as an inherent feature of neurologically adeptibility, a response to containment, begets causes, whereupon one can ponder whether this set up may rise even to the political entrapment of modern populations.

One can look to effects, and start to investigation in such a way as to perhaps meet the quest from the other end.

Anxiety per se is never obvious, it can best be described as a feeling of unease, of a restless never ending search for something that never ceases, because the search is open ended, the uncertainty may be too great , interfering with the very process of the search and its associated cognitive apprehension.

What is sought? What can a temporary object gain to relieve the tension which has become chronic in the threadmill like , fixed nature of the eventual objectless-ness of seeking new objects, to replace the seeming attained ones? My guess is, that an attained object is forgotten, diminishing its value with the passage of time.

If the object search has diminished to the point where asking the question, of, what the object was in the first place, is denied, for a conscious awareness of an objec-purposeless quest is not rationally acceptable to the modern psychi.

As this quest is abandoned, so is the query toward stress, and anxiety in general as a adjucation to the lack of object, or cause.

So looking at it from anxiety related states, from general aspects of confinipement, entrapment, may not fit the bill either, since these are justifications transferred from causes.

The anxiety related disorders, are categorically may or may not be called illnesses per say, although, nominally, an illness should not conjure up psychiatrists, profound signs that only crazy people exhibit, an illness is a term to describe a mental state, which weighs on a person, making preventing his wellness.

However, sticks and stones, have made people worse in the past, is something that has given impetus to water down fixed terminology thanks to Szasz, Laingand others, and has become mainstream.

Some of the effects of anxiety can be observed in substance abuse, pathological stealing, fears and obsessions of all kinds, OCD, promiscuity, personality issues , social and other phobias, the list goes on, and all of the above nowadays are characterized as anxiety based reactions.

That social and political acts based on entrapment do play a major role in managing behavior, wittingly or not, is probably true, as the argument goes for the huge profits made by pharmacological behemoths, undoubtedly thinking to themselves that the social benefits far outweigh the lining of their pocketbooks.

Social control, may be a symptom, rather then an object as well , to the adaptive condition which needs all the help it can gain through progressive health science, namely public health and affiliated institutions.

Finally the natural state of adaptation, ironically, had a cause much much dire, when previous institutions of health related issues much depended on archaic and superstitiously biased decisions made by questionable authority. The stress was less, because people were repressed to resign themselves to the veracity of such authority, seeing in them kindly father figures. That the were more that then they are now, in retrospect, offers no comfort to those of limited intelligence, whose trust did not , or could not fathom those in authority having less then perfect knowledge in their field.

In this way, entrapment, containment can be seen in the context of vastly larger demand for wider scope of knowledge, set against a larger social field of a society much versed in self help and psychotherapeutic help, not to mention pointing to every other person as either drunk, or crazy.

This diminution in meaning has helped more people then laying on couches for ever-relating early experiences to some Freudian knit wit , still versed in old time religion and selling snake oil.

what if we are supposed to be taken to the limit? if it were a sport you’d see ‘mental illness’ as an obstacle. not that all mental health issues have roads out of them of course, but I do think they all have tangents, like if you catch it fast enough. oh and if there is someone holding a hand out and not waiting to pounce.

Even if it were a proven fact that we are “supposed to be taken to our limits”, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t an illness involved. If one goes deep into nihilism they are going to become mentally ill. Does that mean it’s “bad” that they are going deep into nihilism? Not necessarily.

Or let’s go with a sports example (since you mentioned it). If someone breaks their leg making a tackle, they are injured. The fact that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing doesn’t make their leg any less broke.

of course there will be extremes where it is mental illness. its more a way of how you look at these things. if there is no apparent way past whatever is causing anxiety, then distraction is as good as anything. this is why art is therapeutic, and why anything you find interesting can distract you long enough to not be feeling the former anxiety. the mind just needs enough stuff to do - when it hasn’t got a thing, it searches, and if nothing is yielded then that energy will turn to anxiety.

Great post Amorphos

You might be interested in a part of my philosophy called Confinement - I will be making a thread about it in the future.

Anxiety is indeed a natural state. Too much of it could possibly lead to corruption of other emotional states but as to it being a mental health issue - I have to agree with you - from what I can tell it is more like a signaler to something going wrong outside - only if ones logic is still intact.

=D>

yea i’d say reason keeps one sane. :slight_smile:

Amorphos

Lol, I’d agree. I wonder if those moments when I feel like I am going insane is because the reason I am dealing with is my neurons getting bored or some other psychological effect. :slight_smile:

So I am wondering if neurons get bored whether they can experience other states too. It must start from small groups of neurons. I can not imagine a single neuron having a concept of boredom.

The must be an upper number of neurons that we reach where we become aware of our own boredom.

:smiley: