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Anxiety is an inescapable and existential part of the human condition.

Avoiding or repressing existential anxiety can lead to pathological anxiety.

Anxiety is related to worry and stress.

This is Part 1 of a series of posts on anxiety.

Anxiety, sometimes called the “great imitator” because of its ability to mimic and assume various forms of physical and psychological symptoms, can manifest in myriad ways, one of which is persistent, excessive worrying. According to the American Psychiatric Association, in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation) about events such as school or work performance have been present more days than not for a period of at least six months. By definition, this incessant worrying is difficult to control and causes clinically significant distress and/or impairment in social, occupational or other daily activities.

Ironically, worrying—which is often an attempt to anticipate and prevent bad things from happening—tends to make us even more anxious, creating a never-ending and constantly escalating cycle of anxiety: worry, stress, more anxiety, more worry, etc. Why do we worry as much as we do? What exactly is it we worry about? And how might we learn to worry a little less?

First and foremost, we worry because we fear the future. The unknown. We worry about what will happen to us, our family, our partner, our business, our income, our savings, our home, our possessions, our country, our world, the cosmos, etc. Will there be nuclear war? Cataclysmic natural disaster? Serious illness? Loss? Divorce? Legal problems? Economic meltdown? Terrorist attacks? Mass shootings? Political assassinations? We live in a universe that is inherently unpredictable, dangerous, and deadly. Indeed, anxiety can be understood existentially as an acute, subliminal, or subconscious awareness of life's intrinsic insecurity—and, ultimately, the ever-present possibility and absolute inescapability of death. So much of what we worry about has to do with losing what we have:........

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