Dr Katzenstein continues….
“Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. We continue our discussion of anxiety which, as we said, is neither a positive nor negative emotion, but rather an emotion that tells us when we're at risk, when there's something to be fearful of, or when there's something important that we needed to be alerted to.
Unfortunately, we live in a world in which all emotions that are uncomfortable are considered bad or negative, and this has led to a societal belief that we shouldn't have any anxiety at all. As a result of this mindset, when we do have anxiety (even about things that are appropriate to have anxiety about), we think there’s something wrong with us.
There are countless self-help books and TED talks etc. with claims to transform you to never fear anything and reduce or eliminate any anxiety or stress from your life.
This creates an expectation that we should never have anxiety.
What inevitably happens, and I've seen this countless times, is that we begin to develop anxiety about our anxiety. So, it's not enough that we might feel anxious about something, but now we worry about the fact that we're worried, because the societal expectation is that we shouldn't have any worries to begin with.
We find ourselves in an anxiety loop- not just feeling anxious about the original trigger of the anxiety, but also feeling anxiety about the fact that we're having anxiety.
We call this secondary anxiety or meta-anxiety, and the to deal with this is to accept that:
A: anxiety is an okay emotion to have, and
B: having it is not a bad thing. It's an important part of our makeup as human beings.
To recap, the societal expectation or standard of having no anxiety is perpetuated by marketing, self-help books and the like, which falsely promote this (fake) reality that you can have a life without any anxiety, actually creates more and more additional anxiety!
Thank you.”