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While it may seem counterintuitive, one of our great problems today is too little anxiety, at least of a certain kind. As the psychologist Rollo May and before him philosophers Paul Tillich and Soren Kierkegaard contended, a modicum of anxiety is necessary—and indeed urgent—to live a vital and fulfilled life; at least for many of us.

These observations of anxiety have turned out to be even more prophetic today. For today we have so many means to avoid anxiety, any kind of anxiety. Let me count a few of the ways (some of which are admittedly beneficial in some circumstances): Our tech industry gives us ample means to make instant but remote connections with people; enables relationships to be conducted in the comfort of our highly controllable and familiar silos; provides us with instant directions when we’re out on the road; and gives us instant answers to our everyday questions, like what the side effects are of a pill, or how you define clinical depression, or where to get that sweater you like.

It provides us with instant entertainment and books, and it allows us to “cancel” people without having to deal with the consequences of our decisions. We also find instant answers in many of our political leaders and ideologies today. The leader or ideology that can squeeze a provocative message into a tweet can rally thousands, even millions, to march or even riot. The soundbites we get on social media or television can condense political messages into readily-digestible slogans or calls for action.

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The look or style of our leaders can sometimes have more sway than the substance of their messages. Many search for solutions in popping pills or simplistic creeds, whereas others find comfort in easy divisions of “us vs. them,” “truth vs. falsity,” or “winning vs. losing.” Yet few of these “remedies” actually resolve the complex issues of getting along together as families, communities, and nations, let alone individual personalities.

Even psychology has a tendency to avoid anxiety through its stress on overt and measurable behavior as distinct from the complex and often ambiguous experiences of living. As the great observer of human folly Blaise Pascal put it some 370 years ago, “the heart has reasons that reason knows not.” How much has our stress on “happiness“ or “seven steps to success” pervaded our mindset in psychology rather than the more messy yet likely accurate recognition of the great paradoxes that beset human life, like the fact that we are in the process of dying the very moment we’re living, or that love and sorrow are so often intermixed, or that meaningful engagements can be and often are riddled with doubt?

Of course, arguably, the most perilous example of anxiety avoidance in our society—and many others—is the heavy reliance on weaponry to resolve both personal and international disputes. Our society is permeated by guns. Some politicians seem only too ready to send us into war at the slightest provocation, and too many civilians are quick to resort to armaments—or discharge them in the most heinous acts of revenge.

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It is for these reasons that I call for a renewed appreciation for anxiety—an appreciation that would preempt a lot of the mayhem we see in the world. The term I have chosen for this preemptive anxiety is “life-enhancing anxiety.” Life-enhancing anxiety is the dynamic emancipatory anxiety that bolsters our vitality in living. It is the signal that we are awake and alive, exploring new fields, and experiencing fresh discoveries. It is the anxiety of poignant and meaningful relationships, profound experiences of awe, the vibrance of creativity, and the richness of intercultural exchange.

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• What Is Anxiety?

• Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

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How do we cultivate life-enhancing anxiety? This is the basis of a very long conversation (and a book I’m working on), but I think we can start by looking much more critically at the conditions we co-create both as caretakers and cultures; what we encourage in regard to livelihood; and what we emphasize in our politics and cultural leadership.

In short, I define life-enhancing anxiety as anxiety that enables us to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence; and it is integral to if not foundational for a sane and flourishing world.

Author’s note: I want to thank Otto Rank scholar and close associate Robert Kramer for helping me to conceptualize life-enhancing anxiety, as well as Rollo May, Ernest Becker, and Irvin Yalom for their trenchant inquiries into this topic. Finally, I am preparing a book on this topic tentatively titled Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World.

References

Schneider, K.J. (2023). Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World. University Professors Press.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

May, R. (1950/1977). The meaning of Anxiety. Norton.

May, R. (1981). Freedom and destiny. Norton.

Yalom, I. (2009). Staring at the sun. Jossey-Bass.

Vanhooren, S. (2022). Existential empathy: The challenge of “being” in therapy and counseling. Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/84984616/Existential_Empathy_The_Challenge_of_Being_in_Therapy_and_Counseling?email_work_card=thumbnail

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If interested, I elaborate on this talk in my forthcoming book “The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age.”

If we want to understand the therapeutic insights of Becker and Rank, then we have to understand our relationship to existence, not only to physiology, cognition, or even parents. We need to understand our plunge into a vast, unknown sea, and our attempts to negotiate that plunge. In a nutshell, we need to understand what Rank (1924) calls our “trauma of birth,” or what I call our “drama of birth” because I don’t think it’s all trauma, as it includes elements of wonder and discovery along with shock and disorientation. In short, we need to be cognizant of our radical shift from relative nonbeing and unity to sudden, abrupt being and pandemonium!—along with the groundlessness and helplessness that ensues from that.

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How We Are “Met” at Birth

We also need to understand the whole problem of how we are “met” at birth—both by our caretakers and the culture that surrounds them. For the crucial question is this: Are we met with supportiveness and understanding toward that radical “otherness” of the world we come into (including within our own inner world) or are we met with comparatively fear-based presumption, suspiciousness, and devaluation as the guiding principle? This is, in essence, the whole project of existential and existential-integrative (EI) therapy—to help people address and form new internalizations toward the helplessness and groundlessness, the primal trauma of their wounds. I call the aim of this project “Life-Enhancing Anxiety” (Schneider, 2023)—the ability to “live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence.”

To elaborate, EI therapy is one way to understand and coordinate a variety of bonafide approaches within an existential or experiential framework. The main aim is to help the client find “ground within the groundlessness” of their struggle, whether that struggle is depression, anxiety, addiction, isolation, narcissism, or other so-called psychopathologies. The cultivation of presence or the holding and illuminating of that which is palpably significant within the client and between client and therapist is key, as is the client’s desire and capacity for change. The chief and ongoing question is “How is the client presently living, and how are they willing to live?”

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Passive and Active Mirroring

This often implicit question and the pursuit of ground within groundlessness is fostered by how the therapist “holds” the client (which serves as a model for the client’s cultivation of presence) as well as providing an active or passive “mirror” to the client to help him/her “see” how he/she both desires to live and stops themselves from living. A passive mirror is characterized by the therapist’s attention to areas of significance, not only in the words clients utter but also in the way they convey those words, their affect, facial expressions, and other gestures that may convey the fuller contexts for their words. Passive mirroring also entails paraphrases and reflections of what the therapist “hears” in clients’ narratives. Active mirroring is the more intimate and engaged sharing of therapists’ experience with their clients, in the service of deepening clients’ exploration of given concerns.

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Both active and passive mirroring is one of the subtler arts of EI and other existential and psychodynamic orientations that requires deft skill and clinical judgment. After enough revisitations (repetitions) of this mirroring process, and as clients get a deeper sense of their inner battles (i.e., the part of themselves that’s attempting to break through and free themselves and the self-protective part that attempts to block and squelch that freeing process), clients are increasingly in a position to find their “counter-will,” as Rank put it, to overcome and transform the blocks.

Awe-Based Consciousness

Optimally, a result of this overcoming is a renewed relationship to existence where one has access to a much greater range of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and ultimately perhaps a whole new orientation toward life beyond the attainment of particular goals or meanings. I call this holistic, spiritual sensibility “awe-based.” By awe-based, I mean the ability to engage life with humility and wonder (or sense of adventure) toward all existence. I also mean the capacity to optimize life-enhancing anxiety or the capacity to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence, the paradoxes of existence.

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This experience of our smallness and fragility and yet boldness and ability to transcend, and to do so creatively, is what Becker, following Kierkegaard and Rank, meant by “maturity.” In his own words Becker (1973) notes

If there is tragic limitation in life, there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance in which we can fit creatively.

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Becker (1973) also noted

Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. (p. 284)

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The Book: Life-Enhancing Anxiety

The Book: The Paradoxical Self

I’ve been hit with death anxiety or the fear of losing my foothold on life/reality several times over my 69 years. This happened in the wake of my brother’s death when I was very young; in the midst of a storm while body surfing in the ocean; in 4 feet of snow at the side of a ski slope; and in the upheaval of isolation far from home. I’m sure many of us can relate to such times where the fabric of the familiar is ripped by an unexpected shock that lays bare the groundlessness—the utter and radical disorientation—of existence.

I’m also sure that COVID-19 has played this role for many. The virus has ruptured family ties, daily routines, social gatherings, vocational goals, classrooms, and travel plans. It has terrified children and adults, and has instilled continual low-level anxiety with every effort to move about and live “normally.” In short, COVID-19, like every traumatic shock, has stripped us of our moorings, both physical and psychological, and this dislocation shakes the very foundations of what it means to be a contained, coherent being.

But there is another way to view death anxiety. This is a path that Ernest Becker hinted at but did not make fully explicit in his classic The Denial of Death and that is the path of awe. Awe can be understood as the humility and wonder or sense of adventure toward living and it provides a very different course direction than many of the other ways we react (as distinct from respond) to death anxiety. Becker was brilliant at unpacking the former, but only began pointing the way with regard to the latter. This is not at all to discount the enormity of Becker’s contribution to our understanding of the human situation, and particularly fear and anxiety, but probably due to his tragically short life (of 49 years) he had much less to say about constructive ways to counter (that is, respond to as distinct from react against) death anxiety.

That said, Becker did articulate how a more “balanced” perspective on death anxiety, one that recognized its inevitability and the folly of humans attempting to erase or pretend we’re superior to it, could be salutary. This perspective, Becker suggested would neither deny nor catastrophize death anxiety but encounter it in its full creative and tragic dimensions, and thereby enable people to live fuller and more creative lives. To put it succinctly, Becker pointed to awe as an enlivening antidote to the crippling, overreaching, and ultimately embittering reactions to death anxiety that have plagued humanity since its inception.

In many ways, one could look at my body of work on awe (in books such as Rediscovery of Awe, Awakening to Awe, The Polarized Mind, The Spirituality of Awe, and The Depolarizing of America) as attempts to complement Becker’s denial of death anxiety with accounts of encounter with death anxiety.

In this work and through my personal experience, I have come to see awe as one of the few spiritually oriented perspectives that embraces the dread and unease of living as fully as it does the joy and exuberance of living, and as a result becomes revitalizing. It is revitalizing because it recognizes that “death” in its many forms—loss, shock, groundlessness—is an opening as well as imprisonment, and if we can somehow hold both we are afforded the gifts that both hold. This is not a pollyannish contention because it does not at all deny the horrific and tragic; but it is also not a cynical and despairing view because it affirms equally that disarray and disorientation bring possibilities and discoveries. For examples of this paradox-based sensibility, consider the lives of people like Stephen Hawking whose battle with ALS did not stop him from passionately appreciating the magnificence of the universe; or Viktor Frankl who found “freedom to be” in the most confining circumstances of the death camp; or Maya Angelou who, following a childhood molestation, found new life through great literature, and so on. These exemplars were neither pollyannish nor cynical; they fully acknowledged—and knew—the dislocations of living, but they also at the same time experienced liberation through those dislocations, and the combination brought zest, resilience.

Now I’m not saying that we can all be like Hawking, Frankl, or Angelou, but I am saying that they can be our “North Stars,” our touchstones toward a more awe-based outlook. Hence if they could find such depth and intensity—such aliveness—in the depravity of their circumstances, surely we can aspire to see the “more” in ours. Psychotherapy and meditation practices are a couple of the paths we can take toward this sensibility, but it is sometimes useful for us to simply stop what we are doing for a moment, collect ourselves as best as possible, and try to notice (vs. judge) the array of possibilities before us. This can be the crucial first step.

References

E. Becker (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.

K. Schneider (2004). Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life. Paragon House.

K. Schneider (2009). Awakening to Awe: Personal Stories of Profound Transformation. Jason Aronson.

K. Schneider (2013). The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do About It. University Professors Press.

Recent Works on Awe

K. Schneider (2023). Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World. University Professors Press.

K. Schneider (in press). The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for our Broken World. University Professors Press.

Note: This article is a slightly updated version of an article that was published in Psychology Today Online on January 28th, 2021. Copyright, Sussex Publishers, LLC.