The Problem of Overwhelming Anxiety: How Should it Be Managed?

Motor activity is always in close relationship with all mental activity. Its semiological study is particularly important since it is one of the most immediate ways, sometimes the first, to know the patient and observe him very objectively.

The last pandemic, like never before in the History of Humanity, has tested, in depth and extent, the person’s last reserves of calm – calm, particularly of the Spanish people, which Velázquez must have painted.

The cloistering

The institutional confinement imposed during the pandemic period brought with it complex reactions. We can distinguish:

The anxiety pandemic

Among the disorders that occurred most frequently in the last pandemic, anxiety occupies a primary place. Vital anxiety or circle of vitality – as López Ibor liked to call it – is a state of mind that is similar, if not identical, to the terms that in old Spanish were defined as “anguish”, “fatigue” and “heartache”.

These terms place us in the problem of emotion itself, which would therefore be the central point of the problem. During the pandemic stage, states of fatigue occurred on a large scale, which is true, but it is also true that The triggering cause was not primarily the physical effort of being cloistered in a very limited and closed portion of space, but the repeated psychological trauma, sometimes of great intensity, of receiving news of the number of deaths that were being counted day by day.

If we compare a war conflict with the pandemic, it is easy to guess that states of fatigue would occur on a large scale. Precisely the pandemic, because it is a state of “imposed institutional confinement”, would prevent a series of physical sufferings that occur in combat troops, but what characterizes the person who suffers from imposed confinement during the pandemic in relation to a soldier on the battlefield is precisely the great emotional tension. And why did these people who were at home during the pandemic get sick?

A soldier, due to successive combat experience, loses confidence in his ability to defend a precious thing: individual life. The person, who in a state of pandemic was suffering from anxiety, had the purpose of removing him from something that threatened him and from which he cannot defend himself other than with confinement – this is what we call “active confinement”: aggressive type when the person establishes his relationships with the environment in a hostile manner, claiming to defend themselves.

However, this external coercion – from the state of the nation – that opposes escape – escaping, by doing whatever it takes, from the infectious agent wherever it exists – requires a constant effort on the part of the person to inhibit and control this anxiety. As new psychological traumas occur – official announcements of daily casualties due to the infectious agent -, the person gradually loses its inhibitory force, anxiety dominates more and more and ends up becoming an ungovernable energy that disintegrates the emotional control of the individual.

Viewed in this way, anxiety – on the battlefield – consequently goes from a stage in which it constitutes a biological response, with the aim of keeping the organism alert and prepared for flight, to a pathological phase that is self-destructive – here the institutional and imposed confinement is always, and would be considered, an important symptom that reflects serious and profound disturbance of mental activity.

Anxiety in life

A question arises easily. This mechanism occurs or can occur in serious psychological traumas such as during the pandemic, but what happens in ordinary life? Exactly the same. The anxiety reactions presented by the person in a state of institutional confinement, together with the repeated psychological trauma of the number of casualties due to the coronavirus, are the same that any other person can offer in the struggle with the harsh reality but seen under a strongly magnified lens. –The author, in his professional practice, has been able to contrast this repeatedly for not sparing, for a psychology of everyday life, the task of unmasking the patient. Ordinary life, precisely because it is so real, is mediated by a number of lies, deceptions, and self-deceptions that, when unmasked, produce anxiety.

But this is not yet the crucial problem, but how does the overreaction occur? because the problem of anxiety cannot be reduced to a merely physiological problem, because in addition to not being constant – anxiety is never constant – it is not a cause, but rather an objective expression of the central disturbance, which is none other than having to take charge of their situation, which means solving the problem of how do I have to live? Why my effort? Why live? Who am I really? What do I have to do with my life? and this despite possible social or professional success.

And most importantly: which path to choose? Because I don’t live to be in good health, but rather I am in good health and I want to continue to be in good health to do things with my life. And the overflow reaction is that pathological event of a psychoneurotic nature that prevents me from distinguishing between morning fatigue and morning depression, when in reality, the problem is the opposite, because at the base of these states there is a common factor and that among the symptoms anxiety mainly stands out.

We return again to the problem of emotion, because while the animal is structured with its corresponding world, the person has abandoned this circle of biological existence, and sees himself in the unavoidable obligation – we already said it – to solve the problem of his existence.

And what does it mean to solve the problem of your existence? You have to give meaning to your life. No matter the distinction we make between the different types of confinement (imposed institutional or voluntary), confinement, although it is always an important symptom, which can be interpreted as disturbance, can also be used to give value to the things of this world, and that , also, is called its meaning; Therefore, we say that meaning is that through which a thing enters the world of values ​​– regardless of the distinction we make from why? and the for what? of enclosure-, meshes with all of these and forms a harmonious whole with them.

But of course, values ​​only exist for subjects endowed with the estimative capacity, in the same way that equality and difference only exist for people capable of comparing. In this sense, and only in this sense, we can speak of a certain subjectivity in the value and meaning that I can give to my life without confinement being able to translate into a serious and profound disturbance of mental activity. Considered in this way, overflowing anxiety is not only not pathological but rather fulfilling, since it requires the person to make an elastic adaptation to the possibilities offered to them.