Anxiety: Villain or Heroine?

From a species' survival mechanism to frank pathology.

Some authors define the modern era as the Age of Anxiety, linking this psychological event to the bustling existential dynamics of modern society; industrial society, competitiveness, rampant consumerism, and so on.

It is said that a person's mere participation in contemporary society alone fulfills a sufficient requirement for the emergence of Anxiety. Thus, living anxiously has come to be considered a condition of modern man or a common destiny to which we are all, in some way, bound.

Certainly, even for biological reasons, we can say that Anxiety has always been present in the human journey, from the cave to the spaceship. The novelty is that only now are we paying attention to the quantity, types, and effects of this Anxiety on the human organism and psyche.

Our anxious potential has always remained physiologically present and always carried with it the feeling of fear, its inseparable shadow. It is very difficult to say if the stress (this organic and psychic revolution) that affected cavemen facing a bear invading their dwelling was different from what an ordinary citizen today feels when a robber invades their home. Probably not.

Certain feelings determined by danger, threat, the unknown, and the prospect of suffering are part of human nature. Anxiety became an object of disturbance when human beings placed it not in service of their survival, as they did before, but in service of their existence, with the broad range of quantitative and qualitative circumstances of this existence.

Thus, stress became the emotional representative of Anxiety, the psychic correspondence of all the movement that stress causes in a person. The fact that an event is perceived as stressful does not depend solely on its nature, as happens in the animal world, but on the meaning attributed to this event by the person, their resources, their defenses, and their coping mechanisms.

All of this relates more to personality than to the events of fate themselves. This means that in the animal world, a dog represents to a cat a precise and defined stressful stimulus: an actual dog. In humans, an elevator can represent an actual elevator, if the person does not have pathological anxiety, or a quite stressful stimulus, if the person has claustrophobia.

Although Anxiety favors performance and adaptation, it does so only up to a certain point, until our organism reaches maximum efficiency. Beyond an excess point, Anxiety, instead of contributing to adaptation, will actually contribute to the opposite, that is, to the failure of adaptive capacity.

In our ancestors, the anxiety-stress mechanism was intended for the survival of the species in the face of the dangers inherent in the struggle for life, as happens with any animal above reptiles in the phylogenetic scale. It was a useful mechanism in the case of threats from ferocious animals, tribal wars, climatic adversities, the search for food, the struggle for geographical space, etc.

In modern humans, although these threats no longer exist in their fullness, as they once did, the biological equipment of anxiety-stress continued to exist. Although primitive and concrete dangers no longer occur with the same frequency, the capacity to react anxiously to threats persisted in our nature.

With human civility, other dangers appeared and took the place of those that stressed our archaeological ancestors. Nowadays we fear social competitiveness, security, professional competence, economic survival, future prospects, and an infinity of abstract and real threats. In short, all of this has come to have the same meaning of threat and danger as the issues of pure survival to animal life that haunted our ancestors.

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