The “Right” Way to Be Anxious
I find peace and clarity when I look at life as an adventure
Today I’m leaving the floor to a special voice.
Brenna Lee, an authentic thinker who explores the human experience through philosophy and deep reflection. I loved her refreshing thoughts on anxiety. The artwork is the cherry on top. Happy reading ✨
One of my favorite Grimm’s fairy tales is also one of the least known. It’s called, “The Boy Who Went in Search of Fear.”
The hero is a young man who is so dim-witted and ignorant that he doesn’t even know what it’s like to feel afraid. He’s curious, though, and so he decides to spend three nights in a haunted castle. He encounters demonic animals, ghosts, walking furniture, and all kinds of terrifying apparitions – but all he manages to feel is some confusion and annoyance. As a reward for surviving the castle and finding hidden treasure, the king gives the dim-witted young man his daughter to wed.
Even though he is now rich, secure, and married to a stunning princess, our hero is still dissatisfied. It’s driving him crazy that he’s never experienced fear, and it’s driving his wife crazy that he won’t stop talking about it. Finally, she comes up with a scheme: she and her maid dump a bucket of water and minnows on our hero while he’s sleeping. The sensation of cold fish wriggling against his skin shocks him awake; he gets goosebumps and has a eureka moment: this must be what it feels like to be afraid!
It’s an absurd story, of course, and meant to be entertaining. But I think it also teaches a profound lesson: anxiety is what makes us human. It ennobles us. Without anxiety we can’t be courageous or wise or sensitive. Even our foolish hero could sense this, and that’s why it drove him mad. His inability to feel fear meant he could encounter the most terrifying situation imaginable, and yet he learned nothing from it, and felt nothing. Worst of all, he could not connect with other people including his wife. He was isolated by his lack of anxiety.
One of my favorite philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote that all of us must go through an adventure just like this young man. Each of us must confront anxiety and understand both its positive qualities and its harmful ones, so that we’re neither indifferent to it nor overwhelmed by it. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way,” writes Kierkegaard, “has learned the ultimate.”
Anxious in the right way. I find this phrase both fascinating and cheering. It suggests that we can live with uncertainty, even a little bit of fear, while still flourishing. Experiencing anxiety isn’t the same thing as being weak or neurotic; it’s required for being a sensitive, thoughtful person who pays attention to the world around you. I would even argue that at least a little bit of anxiety is necessary for becoming a good person. But what does “being anxious in the right way” look like?
Of course there are the practical things: noticing our thoughts and naming them, for example; especially when we’re feeling uncomfortable (this one has been very helpful for me). Or going for a walk with our dog, or spending time alone outside, appreciating the beautiful flowers, mountains, or whatever happens to be in our view. The more mindful I am of my thoughts and where my attention is going, the more meaningful my life becomes, and these practices help me with that.
But the most powerful mechanism of all that I’ve discovered for managing anxiety is not any particular ritual or practice. Instead, it’s been a gestalt shift in how I view anxiety itself: as an inevitable part of a life that is interesting, meaningful, and even exciting. There is no adventure without danger or risk. There is no reward without suffering.
Too much anxiety prevents us from being happy. But it’s also impossible to be truly happy as an adult human being without any anxiety. One of the best ways I’ve learned to be anxious in the right way is to view life as an adventure. Only unlike the unfortunate hero in our story (who, I’d argue, is not truly a hero), we have the opportunity to be courageous and grow in ways we can’t imagine.
It might sound romantic, even audacious to call one’s life an “adventure.” Our lives aren’t a film or a storybook with a neat and tidy ending planned out. And yet, aren’t we drawn to movies and great literature because there is something truthful in them?
If you’ve been to a creative writing workshop, you know that one of the most fundamental ingredients of a good story is conflict. Without conflict there’s no growth, no mystery, no challenge, no interest at all. Part of what makes fiction so enjoyable is that we, the audience, can feel reasonably sure most of the time of a happy ending – yet we can’t be entirely sure. And even if the ending is happy, it often won’t be what we expected. Much may still be unresolved. It might even force us to think.
Our own lives are a story that has not yet reached its end – and that uncertainty is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. Anxiety is intense because it’s inseparable from possibility. There are countless possibilities, good and bad, that we can’t even begin to imagine. We know the hero in the story gets to live happily ever after, but what about us?
For example, right now I live a very modest but happy life with my husband and two-year-old daughter. If nothing ever changed, I’d consider my life a very successful one; but of course, change is unavoidable. I hope that the future changes are good ones: a bigger home, for example. Or that my daughter will do well in school and make lots of friends. All of these hopes are reasonable, but there is also a possibility that none of them will happen. And there are darker possibilities still: one of us might die in a car accident. Or come down with bone cancer. Or some other complication so strange and unexpected I couldn’t begin to imagine it.
The fact my life has no guaranteed outcome is a major cause for my anxiety; perhaps for you, too. A natural reaction for many of us is to look for some form of control: eating more leafy greens, saving in a 401K, always wearing a seatbelt, or even “karma-seeking” behavior like spending time with those in need. To a point, there’s a lot of good in such behavior. We need a little bit of sobriety to give ourselves better odds at life.
But it’s not hard to see how we can take this to an extreme. The person overwhelmed by anxiety may choose, out of “safety”, to hardly ever leave her house or let anyone enter it. Such examples are rare, but they do exist. What I see more commonly are milder forms of this: fear of having a family, falling in love, or even getting a dog because of the vulnerability and the variables it creates. Or a fear of talking to someone with a different viewpoint because it may nudge them to shift their worldview. Or simply avoiding all thoughts of one’s anxieties and distracting oneself with devices and a never-ending list of to-dos.
An even more subtle form of control is blind optimism and pessimism: blind optimists try to bypass their anxiety by insisting that all will be well, and therefore there is nothing to worry about. Stubborn pessimists do the same, but by assuming the worst is already happening or will happen. In both cases, there is a reluctance to confront uncertainty and embrace both the good and the bad events that might come out of that uncertainty.
The best companion I’ve found for adventuring through a life of uncertainty is hope. I think hope is a very misunderstood, sometimes controversial concept, and has been for millennia. The ancient Greeks, for example, had very ambivalent feelings about it. When Pandora opened the forbidden box and released evils into the world, the only thing left inside the box was Hope, but this wasn’t necessarily meant to be a consolation; one cynical interpretation is that because hope is still locked in the box, it’s ineffective and worthless. Hope is often associated with nothing more than a feeling, with wishful and sometimes even delusional thinking.
I see hope very differently. To me, it is one of the most powerful and humbling forces in the universe. Hope is the counterweight to anxiety. Both are necessary, but hope is the traveling companion who keeps anxiety in its place, who meets uncertainty head on, who makes the adventure possible – especially when we find ourselves in the abyss and must find our way back out.
The 19th-century poet Maria Rainer Rilke wisely recognized that even the most difficult things we endure can have meaning and beauty if we choose to look for it. In a letter to a fellow poet, he wrote:
We have no cause to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors they are our terrors; if it has abysses those abysses belong to us, if dangers are there we must strive to love them.
The foolish young man who didn’t feel fear while in the haunted castle couldn’t feel joy or excitement, either; nor could he act courageously. Because of his numbness he couldn’t even feel love. He was almost inhuman because of this, which makes him both comical and tragic.
Anxiety is our birthright; it’s what makes us human. We can choose to suppress it, control it or not think about it. Or we can choose to be anxious in the right way, with hope as our guide in the darkness. And if we see life as an adventure, we can learn to love even the challenges and the dangers – not for their own sake, but for what we can learn from them to become wiser, better people.
What does being anxious in the right way look like to you?
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What stayed with me is the thought that anxiety may belong not only to fear, but to possibility.
That felt true. Perhaps what matters is not escaping uncertainty, but learning how not to abandon presence within it.
Lovely, nuanced essay on anxiety, uncertainty, possibility, and hope.
"Anxiety is intense because it’s inseparable from possibility. There are countless possibilities, good and bad, that we can’t even begin to imagine."
When I read this, I thought of Martha Beck; she has spoken about how the opposite of anxiety is not calm but creativity. I think what she meant was that uncertainty and possibility are surrounding us all the time, and that we can either try to control it (not possible) or be in contact with it, meaning we can try to have a more open-minded and playful stance of stepping into that possibility (creativity).