Dealing with Stress & Anxiety: Tips from Our Inner Neanderthal, 2

February 22nd, 2016 · dealing stress anxiety

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As we saw in the first part of this post, we stand to learn important things about dealing with stress and anxiety by looking at our evolutionary heritage.

       Some modern hikers… looking a little bit Neanderthal!

This post builds on Part 1, focusing on what evolutionary and archetypal psychology can teach us about dealing with stress and anxiety.

3. Nothing’s Too Modern about “Modern Anxiety”

While modern life may provide many stressors and sources of anxiety, the actual mechanisms of anxiety have their roots in our biological self, and are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old.

As Prof. Anthony Stevens states, “to be in the grip of a phobia is to realize the power of an autonomous complex operating at an ancient and unconscious level of the brain.”  In the last post, we looked at the evolutionary basis of some of these phobias.  Similarly, we can see the evolutionary roots of many other types of experience that are related to anxiety.

Panic, for instance.  Researchers such as Prof. R. M. Nesse and Columbia’s Dr. Donald F. Klein have made good cases to establish that panic is an evolutionarily-programmed response to situations such as suffocation, or, in fact, to any situation which requires escape via energetic flight.

Also, as far back as the 1920s, researcher W.B. Cannon showed that anxiety itself is a form of vigilant response that enables us to be alert to changes in our surroundings, preparing us to meet any emergency situations that arise.  He showed the connection between anxiety and the body state of arousal which is activated by centres in the limbic system of the brain.

                                              VIGILANCE

4. Dealing with Stress & Anxiety: Getting the Balance Right

Emotions are adaptive responses that evolution has provided.  They serve to keep us safe, and get us through demanding situations.  We now know that we experience anxiety when cues associated with a possible danger have been perceived, but before we get an accurate picture of the real nature of the danger.

This is important, because, as Hans Selye, the famous stress researcher established, organisms perform best when subjected to moderate amounts of stress.  We need to be conscious of this, and avoid putting ourselves into states where the level of stress is so high as to be noxious, even possibly dangerous.  But by the same token, we need to find ways to avoid getting ourselves into a headspace where any amount of stress seems intolerable, as this, too,  is going to keep us out of the mainstream of our lives.

5. Don’t Just Smash the Warning Light

Self-acceptance and self-knowledge are the heart of depth psychotherapy, and have a lot to do with dealing with stress and anxiety in ways that work for us.  We have a choice to listen to the wisdom of the 2,000,000 year old man when it comes to stress and anxiety, or to ignore his wisdom and basically go to war with him.  That last thing is likely not going to go well.

Anxiety is like a flashing red warning light.  The best way to deal with such a flashing light is not to smash it, or just figure out how to turn it off, but to figure our why it has started to flash.

As Prof. Nesse puts it, “The capacities for anxiety and mood were shaped by natural selection because they have been useful….  [S]ome conditions that seem like diseases are actually defences.”

Our anxiety is telling us something essential about our lives.  If we can listen, hearing our own being and our unconscious mind, anxiety may well lead us toward something that can gives a greater sense of harmony and completeness in our lives.  However, there is no alternative to doing the hard work of getting inside our anxiety, understanding why it’s there, and how it actually affects us.

Finding ways to listen to our own being, and understanding what really motivates us, are key part of our journey to wholeness.

Brian Collinson, Registered Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

PHOTOS:    ©  Andrew

© 2016 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

Dealing with Stress & Anxiety: Tips from Our Inner Neanderthal, 1

February 8th, 2016 · dealing stress anxiety

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Dealing with stress and anxiety is a crucial topic in our time: do evolutionary and archetypal psychology have anything helpful to say about it?

Your Neanderthal consultant

Well, it turns out that they do.  Learning to acknowledge our anxiety, and to give it its appropriate due, is an important exercise in self-acceptance, as a part of psychotherapy.  It amounts to acceptance of part of what Jung would call our inner “2,000,000 year old person.”

Anxiety has evolved as part of our psyche for some pretty good reasons.  Just what exactly does it do for us?

1. You Need Your Anxiety

Much as many modern people feel that their lives are riddled with useless anxiety, the fact is, that we do genuinely need our anxiety to survive.  As psychiatrist Anthony Stevens puts it:

Psychiatric emphasis on anxiety as a classifiable “illness” has given rise to the erroneous belief, current through most of [the last 100 years], that anxiety is “neurotic” and that no well-adjusted person should expect to suffer from it.  In fact, the capacity to experience anxiety is indispensible to survival….  An animal without fear is a dead animal. [italics mine]

Evolution has developed anxiety as a means of helping organisms to survive and thrive.  In fact, anxiety is a special form of alertness that helps humans and most of our animal kin to register when there are changes in our environment, so that we can respond appropriately to any type of emergency that might arise.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists can demonstrate how irrational fears, or phobias, are linked to appropriately adaptive responses that have somehow been blown out of proportion.

2. Many Anxiety Disorders are Out-of-Order Forms of Adaptive Strategies

Depth psychotherapists well know that, when anxiety gets out of whack, it doesn’t help us to respond to situations properly.  Yet, even then, we can see how phobias get their start from an appropriate response that has a basis that facilitates our survival:

We need to deal with stress and anxiety in an appropriate and complete way, that accords with depth psychotherapy.  To do that requires coming to terms with parts of the psyche that are rooted in our evolution, and fixed in responses to the world that date right back to our early human and proto-human ancestors.  In speaking of contemporary research into anxiety and panic, Dr. Stevens tells us, “[All researchers] agree that the physiological and psychological components of anxiety, fear and panic galvanize an organism to adaptive action.”

3. Personal & Archetypal Dimensions of Dealing with Stress & Anxiety

A key concern for therapy, then, is to understand how stress and anxiety in the individual have been distorted into forms that keep them from helping to “galvanize an organism [ourselves!] to adaptive action.”  To understand that fully in the life of the individual means examining both the personal roots of their anxiety, and the ways that archetypal elements of the psyche come into play in that person’s particular situation, and understanding the role that all these factors play in our journey to wholeness.  We’ll be opening this up more in Part 2 of this post.

Brian Collinson, Registered Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

PHOTOS:    ©  Clemens Vasters ; Topher McCulloch

© 2016 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)