How anxiety can lead to peace

A conversation with Robert Gerzon
By Ravi Dykema

We may be anxious about our children’s well-being or whether there’s enough gas left in the car to get where we’re going. We may be anxious about the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness or about what color socks to buy, but at some time or another, every single one of us has experienced anxiety. About 45 million Americans are suffering from a serious anxiety problem, and the economic costs are staggering as well: an estimated $65 million annually.

Anxiety is the number one mental health problem in the United States, but psychologist Robert Gerzon thinks it’s not something we should try to eradicate. To the contrary, writes Gerzon in his book Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, if we channel anxiety and get it working for us instead of against us, "it can become our most direct route to personal and spiritual growth." We can only do that by learning to accept anxiety as a natural—even sacred—part of life.

Says Gerzon, we can find serenity, surprisingly, "by looking for it where we least expect to find it—in anxiety itself. Anxiety is a fact of life and if we use it in the right way, it can guide us to serenity more directly than anything else."

A psychotherapist with a background in psychology, holistic medicine, philosophy and spiritual studies, Gerzon developed and presented the "Mastering Anxiety" program first at Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan in Boston and then at medical and holistic education centers nationwide. He is a licensed mental health counselor and has recorded numerous personal growth cassettes, in addition to conducting a private psychotherapy practice in Concord, Mass.  You can visit his website at www.gerzon.com.

Gerzon spoke with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema at our Boulder office.

RD: We all know what anxiety is like. How do you describe it?

RG: During episodes of anxiety, the world appears more hostile. I feel pursued by time, compelled to move faster and get more done. My breathing becomes shallower. My body tenses; shoulders hunch-up. My heart beats faster. My blood pressure rises. My brow furrows and I feel a vague, disquieting sense that things are not okay the way they are, that I am not quite okay. Mild anxiety is the feeling of being attacked, not by a big bear, but by swarms of mosquitoes.

RD: How do people handle anxiety?

RG: Distracting yourself from the anxiety is one of the most common ways of dealing with it, by watching TV or having a drink or spacing out. Some people are oriented more toward control: "I want to manage this feeling of anxiety by getting more control over my life and other people." To a certain extent, it’s a healthy response. You want to be in control of your life and plan ahead. But if it goes to extremes, you’re trying to control other people; you’re trying to over-control your own emotions. This type of controlling can lead to the obsessive/compulsive clinical disorders, where people want to get that sense of control by some sort of ritual action: "I can control the world by switching a light switch on and off enough times, and that way I’m sure that nothing bad happens today."

RD: If you don’t face your anxiety during the day, or if you don’t distract yourself, what happens?

RG: When your head hits the pillow at night, all this suppressed stuff leaps to the surface and you start worrying, or you start getting this vague sense of unease which has to do with the undigested emotions from the day. That’s why I recommend a period of brief meditation at night before you go to bed, a time to get in touch with what you haven’t had time to process during the day. If you take a little bit of time to do that more consciously, when you go to bed a lot of that work has been done and it doesn’t have to get worked out in dreams or through insomnia.

RD: So, you recommend that people sit and let their thinking mind generate its thoughts and its paranoid projections and eliminate all that stuff for a little while?

RG: Just clearing, just dumping it out, letting it come to the surface.

RD: Does it happen at times other than at night?

RG: Sure, it can hit at anytime. People have anxiety attacks and panic attacks. They’ll find them coming out of the blue, right in the middle of their day, and these are people who have a lot of repressed emotions that they don’t have the skills to deal with. All of a sudden, there they are. I call it the revenge of the repressed, and it’s very disturbing.

RD: You have a very interesting definition of anxiety.

RG: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what it is. On the purely physiological level, it’s an excitation and arousal of the nervous system. But, when we use the word anxiety, we’re covering a lot of things. It’s often used as a synonym for fear and for stress. All of the things that we call stress are really situations where we’re having an anxiety reaction to some event in our life. There’s some feeling of being threatened. It’s different from fear. If you use the word "fear" correctly, it would only refer to your reaction to a real clear and present physical danger. All the other things that we call fear, like fear of intimacy or fear of flying or fear of death, are more correctly termed anxiety. Anxiety is about something that’s a little bit more vague in the future, something you can’t react to physically in the moment. Fear is so much easier to deal with than anxiety, because there’s that threat, there’s that mugger, there’s that dog jumping at you or whatever it is, and anxiety is often like, "So, where is it? Where’s the threat?"

RD: Is anxiety rooted in childhood causes?

RG: I think that it’s not even so much specific incidents, but the general emotional atmosphere of your home that will make you either a more relaxed, confident person or a more anxious person. If there’s a parent who’s alcoholic or who has mood swings or has a lot of financial problems, that will constantly stress the family. If there’s a basic sense that things are not really safe in the home, then a child’s nervous system will get cranked up a few notches, and the child will grow up with a sense of hyper-vigilance.

RD: To many people, then, the solution is to go back in memory, perhaps with psychotherapy or some kind of psychological housecleaning process, and deal with that stuff and then be free of the anxiety. But it sounds like your approach is different.

RG: I think it’s important to focus on the present, because that’s where we live. I don’t believe the old Freudian approach of "Tell me about your childhood." I think that keeps you stuck in the past to a large extent. What I try to do is focus on the present: who are you in the present; what are the problems in the present; what are your goals in the present. As you start to focus on what we can do to help you meet those goals, that’s where the past starts to come up to the surface, things that have been blocking you from doing that. You end up working on the past without going back into the past. RD: How prevalent is anxiety among people you know?

RG: The figures surprised even me: One out of six Americans is suffering from a serious anxiety problem, a clinical anxiety problem. That is 45 million people. And the economic costs are staggering as well, $65 billion a year.

RD: How does anxiety translate into other of society’s pervasive problems, like addiction or depression?

RG: I see fundamental anxiety as being at the root of basically any problem that human beings experience. It starts with that feeling of being threatened. Then how you respond to that could turn into an addiction—you get a feeling such as, "I gotta have a drink." You give yourself some temporary relief. But of course it creates more anxiety in the long run. Anxiety can also lead to other behaviors: gambling, shopping, compulsive habits of all sorts, and it can also lead to relationship problems. It can lead to health problems. There have been some interesting studies, one from Harvard University, showing that people who are chronically anxious have two to three times greater cardiac health risk than smokers. That just shows how powerful an anxiety reaction is when it’s repeated and chronic in our body. It lowers the immune system’s ability to protect us.

RD: If you went to a physician and said, "I’ve got palpitations and horrible energy crashes in the afternoon. I hyperventilate occasionally and I get really dizzy,"—these are symptoms, right? Would a physician give you medication?

RG: Exactly. That’s something that’s changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. It’s the first line of defense now. People with this kind of problem don’t see a therapist first; they see their physician, and he or she says, "Well, try this. See if this helps." They get a prescription. Prozac is used very widely now for both anxiety and depression.

RD: Does it give people relief, so that they don’t have to come to the physician and get another prescription or get a divorce?

RG: I think it sidetracks most people from dealing with anxiety, because they really haven’t been given any help in dealing with the cause of their anxiety. They’ve been given a pill that chemically reduces some of these symptoms. For some people it works pretty well, for a lot of people it doesn’t.

RD: So what’s your prescription?

RG: It’s really to listen to your anxiety. Not to suppress it, not to ignore it, but to listen to it, and to listen to it in a way that begins to lead you to serenity, that leads you in a direction of personal and spiritual growth.

RD: How do I listen to my anxiety?

RG: I give a formula for that in my book, the A+ formula. It is a basic process for dealing with a problem, an emotion, whatever happens to come up. The first "A" is acceptance. That means, instead of doing the usual thing and distracting ourselves from it or trying to control it, make it go away, we’re just saying "Okay, this thing is there." I might not like it, but it’s there. I will accept it. And that begins to change the dynamic right away. It starts to empower us, because we’re not ignoring it and allowing it to attack us. We’re also not trying to get rid of it, which just entangles us more and more. Before you can get rid of it, you have to accept that it’s there. If you’re ignoring it, you have no control over it, no power over it.

Acceptance leads to awareness, and those two are pretty closely allied. The awareness phase in the A+ process is gathering information. You study the feeling of anxiety and sit with it, breath with it. This is a non-judgmental, information-gathering phase where you are trying to relax with whatever’s happening. That leads to the next step, which is analysis. Think as clearly as you can about what is happening. You need to make some decisions here, figure out what to do about this, develop some sort of strategy to deal with it that leads to the next step which is action. You take that energy of anxiety and you do something with it. It might be a self-calming technique, or it might be a strategy to solve a problem in your life. You try to channel that anxiety energy into some productive avenue.

RD: What would be a concrete example?

RG: You’re in a crowded restaurant, and feeling anxious. You get up and leave. That’s an action that reduces your anxiety. In another situation, you are thinking that this thing you’re worrying about you don’t have any control over. So the action you might take is to let go of trying to control it. The whole idea is that you make your best guess about the next step. That leads to the final step, appreciation, which is a wind-up or review phase of this process. You just appreciate yourself, give yourself a pat on the back for handling it differently than you might have in the past. You also come back to more of a balanced perspective about life instead of focusing on these bad things that might happen. You’re saying, "Well, some things are making me anxious, but actually, most of the things in my life are working pretty well. All of a sudden you’re creating more of a feeling of safety in your world again because you’re noticing all of the things that are working, instead of focusing on the couple of things that you’d like to change. That formula has really helped a lot of people to have a structure for dealing with their anxiety because mostly what happens is that we are taken by surprise. We don’t know what to do about it. We run our habit patterns on our worries, and we end up where we’ve always ended up with them: tangled up even more with anxiety.

RD: What are you talking about when you talk about "right" and "wrong" anxiety?

RG: What I’m talking about is that we all know how to get anxious in the wrong way. We need to learn how to get anxious in the right way about the right things. Getting anxious in the right way means we use it productively. We don’t spend a lot of time with those old toxic patterns. Even the toxic stuff can lead you to emotional healing. That’s why I find it helpful to spend more time listening to the anxiety, because that stuff will reveal itself if you listen.

RD: You suggest that it’s important to distinguish between different types of anxiety. Tell us about that.

RG: Well, I think it’s important because there are different kinds. When you distinguish between them, then you can use different strategies to deal with each level.

RD: What are the three kinds?

RG: Toxic anxiety is the bad kind that doesn’t serve any useful purpose. It’s the anxious chatter-box that’s getting us worked up over nothing. The natural anxiety is the good kind that helps us to grow and protects us from real dangers and helps us to take advantage of opportunities. It’s the one that we can channel into action. Underneath any kind of toxic anxiety is almost always some natural anxiety that we’re not getting to, because we’d rather get more anxious about something that on some level we know is not really real than about something real. We get more anxious about losing five pounds than about the fact our marriage isn’t working. People obsess on those little things and make them big deals while they ignore the big issues, because those are the ones that really make us anxious.

The third type makes us even more anxious. That’s the sacred anxiety, and that’s the one we avoid the most because it has to do with the deepest anxieties, the spiritual, existential anxieties. Adolescence, mid-life, every transition, brings up those big sacred anxiety questions, "Who am I? What’s the purpose of my life? What’s the meaning of life?" It also has to do with the reality of death, that this is a time-limited opportunity on this planet. The sacred anxiety is about the things that we don’t have control over. These are the ones that are much harder to answer, so they make us much more anxious. What I’m suggesting is that these are things that we ought to get more anxious about. People get more anxious about finding a parking place than finding their life purpose. So the sacred anxiety is the one that can actually lead us to serenity.

RD: How do you use sacred anxiety?

RG: I think things like prayer, meditation, self-reflection, taking time to volunteer, help us to look at these issues. Again, it’s acceptance and awareness. Listening to sacred anxiety can be scary, but it also can lead you to a deeper serenity, because it leads you to align your life more with who you really are and what you really want to do with your life. I think most people’s anxiety comes from that sense of, "I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life. This job is meaningless. I don’t know where I’m going." Anxiety’s trying to get us back on the right path. It’s saying "Hey, there’s something that is not working in your life. You’re not happy with this life that you’re living." It’s moving you back into the current of your life. Thoreau says, "Dwell as near as possible to the current of your life." It’s a good feeling when you feel that current carrying you where you want to go. You can’t find it, especially in this culture, unless you listen to your anxiety.

RD: On the other side of that anxiety is serenity?

RG: That’s the idea. But "serene" is not just a placid state where you’re not affected by anything. I think of serenity more as a deeper awareness that we’re living in a safe and loving universe, a basic sense that even though society might be hostile or very competitive, we’re living in this safe universe. Life is not one damn problem after another. It’s really an exciting adventure of self-discovery and these hassles, these problems can be seen as opportunities to learn and grow. You can only get there if you start to work with the anxiety more. That’s the paradoxical aspect of it: if you listen to your anxiety, it brings you deeper. It is obviously something that takes a lot of work on yourself, takes a lot of practice. I’ve certainly seen a change in my life working with this. It used to be that everything would trigger that anxiety response big time and now I find, through practice, that my serenity response is more reliable. This is a very ancient idea, that paying more attention to your spiritual life will lead to serenity.