It’s the weight of the world but it’s nothing at all
Light as a prayer and then I feel myself fall
You’ve got to give me a minute
‘Cause I’m way down in it and I can’t breathe so I can’t speak
I want to be strong and steady, always ready
Now I feel so small, I feel so weak
-Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Anxiety
I’ve always been an anxious person. It feeds my need to plan and research. Back when I worked full-time, it made me a bit of a perfectionist. Any task I was assigned, I completed at 110%. I won awards and a medal, but it was unsustainable. I talked to doctors and found some medicine that helps situationally, but nothing removes the daily anxiety.
Since I stopped working, my anxiety has lessened overall, but in the last couple of months I have noticed it coming back. With anxiety, I can temporarily feel better, but a new baseline will develop. At first, it was Spanish classes. I have never been great at languages, and it never came easy. I still enjoy learning Spanish, but private lessons can be intense…or at least they seem so to me.
In the last couple of months, we have been purchasing a rental, and my anxiety has come back heavily over relatively small problems, most of the time not even real ones. The Stoic Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
My mortgage broker is a childhood friend, and during the process she mentioned how smoothly everything was going, but for me everything felt very chaotic. She is hardened to the ups, downs, and possibilities. I am not hardened, despite this being the fourth house (but first rental) I have bought. The numbers work well with the new rental. We should have no problem getting a return that is almost unheard of in recent years, but I’ve ran the numbers a thousand times and came up with solutions to problems that didn’t exist.
This phenomenon has been studied. The brain’s threat-detection system doesn’t power down when real dangers fade, so it keeps scanning and can treat smaller, ambiguous cues as threats. A 2018 Science study found that when clear examples of a problem become rare, people broaden their definition of it, which helps explain why minor worries can feel major during calm stretches.
Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that once safety and security are met, our attention moves up to belonging, esteem, and purpose. Anxiety can follow, shifting from “will I be okay?” to “is this enough?”, a question that never quite resolves.
I should be grateful that my worries are over relatively small things, but whether this is due to nature or nurture, I think my anxiety is here to stay.
Edvard Munch, Anxiety
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