9/28/21, 5:40 PM How to be anxious | Psyche Guides

GUIDE

How to be anxious
Anxiety might be uncomfortable, but with a philosophical approach you’ll find it
can awaken a thrilling sense of freedom

by David Egan 

David Egan has taught at a number of institutions in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. He
also teaches philosophy classes online for the general public. He is the author of The Pursuit of an Authentic
Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (2019). He is currently working on a book about animals.

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Need to know
Anxiety isn’t normally considered a good thing. It’s an unpleasant feeling associated
with inner turmoil, sleepless nights and chewed fingernails. Take it far enough, and a
psychiatrist will diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. And yet some philosophers have
looked on anxiety as, well, not exactly a good thing but at least as potentially valuable.
Clinical anxiety is simply disabling, but existential anxiety, adopted in the right spirit, is
potentially liberating.

In the first half of the 20th century, the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin
Heidegger both gave a central place to anxiety in their bold analyses of human existence.
Both were influenced – more than they acknowledged – by the 19th-century Danish
philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard (1813-55) was a misfit in the buttoned-down world of Lutheran Copenhagen.

He came from a well-to-do family, studied theology, and became engaged to an
intelligent and engaging young woman. Everything was on course for a life of bourgeois
respectability. Then something inside of him snapped. He broke off his engagement,
withdrew from society, and devoted himself to writing at a ferocious pace while living off
inherited wealth. In the 1840s, he produced more than 30 volumes. His writing was
bitterly polemical, attacking the hypocrisies of Danish society and the Danish Church.
Many of his books were written under extravagant pseudonyms, permitting Kierkegaard
to quarrel even with himself. But no one in tight-knit Copenhagen was under any
illusion about the author’s identity.

His prodigious output included the first analysis of existential anxiety. In The Concept of
Anxiety (1844), the pseudonymous ‘Vigilius Haufniensis’ (‘the watchman of
Copenhagen’) argues that anxiety is the consequence of an honest confrontation with
freedom. Nothing but our own free choice determines what we will make of ourselves,
and the consequences of that choice echo through eternity. For the most part, we don’t
feel the burden of this responsibility because we simply go along with the crowd.
Anxiety (ångest in Danish) lifts us out of that happy torpor and confronts us with our
individual responsibility. This anxiety is burdensome and terrifying but also liberating.

For Sartre (1905-80), our freedom distinguishes us from things. The operations of nature
are causally efficacious. When I throw a rock into the air, its trajectory is subject to the
force of gravity in exactly the same way on every single throw. Human motives lack this
causal efficacy, as anyone who’s made a New Year’s resolution can attest. In that gap
between motive and action – a gap that doesn’t exist between cause and effect – lies the
experience of freedom. And we experience that freedom, Sartre says, as anxiety or
anguish (angoisse).

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Sartre gives two examples of the experience of existential anxiety. The first is vertigo.
Sartre distinguishes vertigo from plain fear. If I’m walking along a precarious mountain
ledge, a bit of loose rock could send me tumbling to my death. I fear for myself as a thing
that is every bit as much subject to the force of gravity as the loose rock I might slip on.
Vertigo, by contrast, is a response not to my subjection to external forces but to my
freedom. With a shudder, I recognise that I could at any moment throw myself over the
ledge. I don’t want to, I’m firm in my resolve not to, but all my present desire and resolve
is causally inefficacious. My present self doesn’t get to determine the choices of my
future self. At every moment, I’m free to chuck all my resolve and throw myself over the
ledge. Anxiety is the chilling recognition of that freedom.

Vertigo is anxiety oriented toward the future: it’s a recognition of the radical freedom of
my future self with regard to my present self. Sartre also imagines a past-oriented
anxiety in the form of a gambling addict. The gambler recognises the harm his addiction
does to him and to those around him and has firmly resolved never to gamble again. But
then he sees a gaming table and feels that resolve melt away. Even as he sits down at the
table, he continues to endorse the resolve not to gamble – he genuinely wants to not
gamble – but his past resolve has no power to compel his present actions.

In the resolve not to gamble and the resolve not to throw myself over the precipice, I
wish, if only temporarily and only in some respects, to be a thing – to be something
whose movements are as locked in place as a rock under the influence of gravity. But to
wish my freedom away is to act in bad faith. Anxiety for Sartre arises as I recognise that,
at every moment, my whole self is in play.

This idea of radical freedom had particular pertinence to Sartre, who was writing in the
midst of the Second World War and supported the French Resistance. He and his fellow
Frenchmen faced stark and dangerous choices concerning collaboration or resistance,
and Sartre saw in these choices expressions that defined their identity.

Whereas Sartre condemned Nazism and French collaborators, Heidegger (1889-1976)

notoriously welcomed the Nazi takeover of his native Germany. Philosophers since have
had to grapple with the question of what to do with the writings of a man who was in
many ways personally loathsome but also deeply insightful. Much of Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness (1943) feels cribbed from Heidegger’s monumental Being and Time (1927),
which offers its own analysis of anxiety (Angst).

For Sartre, anxiety reveals something about us. For Heidegger, it reveals something
about the world – or rather the way that we’re related to it. We live in a world full of
chairs and tables and pebbles and trees and clouds and songs. For the most part, we
suppose those things are all just there and that we happen to be there too, one more item
in the inventory list of the world. What we don’t realise for the most part, according to

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Heidegger, is that the world isn’t a collection of self-standing items but an

interconnected whole bound together by care.

Consider chairs. I happen to be sitting on one at the moment. That’s handy because it
means I can sit out on my balcony on a sunny day while I type this essay. I like breathing
the fresh air and I like talking about philosophy with (and to) other people. The chair fits
into a whole picture of a meaningful life, one where the chair is connected to the sun
and air and other people and philosophy. The chair presents itself to me as a chair
because it has a significant place in this and many other activities that fit into a world
that I care about. Remove care, remove the sense of purpose and meaning that animates
my activities, and the chair’s distinctive chairness starts to slip away.

This is what happens in anxiety, Heidegger says. Anxiety for Heidegger is like an
existential version of that game where you repeat a word enough times that it starts to
sound like meaningless babble. In anxiety, it’s not just the words we use that lose their
familiar meaning but the things in the world around us. Stripped of its ordinary
significance, the chair stands out like an alien object, some bizarre assemblage of stuff.

But like Sartre, Heidegger thinks that anxiety reveals something important: I don’t
simply find myself in a world that makes sense; the significance of the world is
connected to the significance I find in my everyday activities. And that means that I am
partway responsible for the sense the world makes to me.

Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger all think we have a strong motive to flee anxiety when
it strikes us. Our freedom entails a heavy burden of individual responsibility, which is
daunting. Much easier, then, to act as if the big questions of how to live and how to make
sense of things were already settled. All three authors have a life of bourgeois
respectability in their sights, a life where contemporary tastes and fashions dictate how
‘one’ ought to live. The contemporary world is more liberal in offering diverse lifestyles
but those levelling pressures are still there, whether in the feeling that you ought to get a
university degree as a springboard to a fulfilling career, or in the feeling of pressure to
align yourself with the political or aesthetic preferences of your peers. Anxiety is
discomfiting because it presents us with the stark reminder that it doesn’t have to be this
way while providing no guidance about what way it might be instead.

Anxiety is discomfiting – but we can learn to transmute it into something

transformative. In what follows, I offer a few pointers on how to evoke existential anxiety
and put it to good use.

Think it through
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The game of ‘why’

As a starting point for getting a grip on the concept of anxiety, imagine being a five-year-
old again. You might remember that game where a child discovers that there’s no
explanation that can’t be met with the question ‘Why?’:

– What are you doing?

– I’m sending an email to my boss.

– Why?
– Because I want to update her on the project that I’m working on.

– Why?
– Because I want to stay on my boss’s good side.

– Why?
– Because I don’t want to lose my job.

– Why?
– Because I don’t want to have to worry about money.

– Why?

Usually in these games, the grown-up runs out of patience before the child does.
Persistent questioning can be annoying – consider what happened to Socrates. But it can
also be instructive. If you’re willing to play along, the child can help you realise that
financial security is a significant motivator in your life – and confront you with the
question of whether it should be.

Try playing both sides of this game with yourself. Start with any ordinary activity – what
you were doing at this time yesterday, what you plan to do this evening – and ask
yourself why you’re doing (or did) that. Keep probing and see where you get. Try to
answer each ‘Why?’ question as concretely as you can, and frame it in the first-person:
I’m asking why I am invested in these activities.

The child’s discovery of the potentially bottomless series of ‘Why?’ questions reveals
something about the structure of our reasons: there’s no definitive ‘Because…’ Whatever
reasons you think you have for living in the way that you are, in odd moments those
reasons might cease to have a grip on you. Your sense of purpose can swirl away into a
vortex of ‘Why?’ like water swirling down a drain.

Vertigo – a scary version and a fun one

Now let’s consider Sartre’s examples of anxiety. He offers two: the experience of vertigo
and an addiction relapse. The latter doesn’t recommend itself for obvious reasons but try
exploring the former a little. Each of us has a different degree of tolerance for heights –
some people are almost fearless and some start to shake when they’re feet away from a
balcony. Know your own limit and bring yourself to a distance from a drop where you

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feel a little uncomfortable but not genuinely unsafe. Depending on where you are, you
might find a rooftop, a balcony, a bridge or, if you live in rocky terrain, a genuine cliff.
Hold yourself at that point of discomfort for a minute or two without withdrawing. Start
by reminding yourself that there’s no real reason for fear. You’re at a relatively safe
vantage and it would take a stroke of tremendous bad luck for any real mishap to befall
you. That reminder probably won’t disarm your unease. But why not? Are you afraid of
what you might do? Test Sartre’s hypothesis on yourself and see how well it fits.

Sartre focuses on unpleasant outcomes – a tumble over a cliff or a relapse – but there’s
no reason anxiety can’t nudge us toward positive things. Nothing stops you from
throwing yourself off a cliff – but nothing stops you from disrupting your shopping trip
to sit by a panhandler and spend an hour getting to know them either. If anxiety for
Sartre is the recognition that neither our own resolve nor social scripts can constrain our
actions, embracing that freedom needn’t be chilling. It could be awesome.

Defamiliarise the familiar

Now let’s explore Heideggerian anxiety. I likened it to the game of repeating a word
again and again until its meaning drains away. Start by trying a similar exercise with an
everyday tool. Pick up a pen or a fork or a hat, or sit in front of a lamp or a table. (You
could try this exercise with a more high-tech device such as a smartphone but those
have been deliberately designed to arouse and direct your attention, and so it might be
harder to detach yourself from them.) Start by simply looking at it. Spend a couple of
minutes doing this, far longer than you would ordinarily hold an object like this in your
gaze. Then try manipulating it, or yourself, in ways that go against the ordinary grain.
Try balancing the pen on its head. Turn the hat inside out or bring it so close to your face
that you can see the threads of fabric holding it together. Lie on the floor and look up at
the underside of the table. See if you can become absorbed in the bare thingness of the
thing you’re looking at. See if you can unbind yourself from the significance this thing
has in your life.

Once you feel somewhat alienated from your chosen object, direct your attention away
from it and to the space around you. See if you can see everything as alien, as thing-y.
Not walls and floor and ceiling but strangely smooth surfaces joined at abrupt angles.
Try moving about this space in a spirit of wonder. Touch the walls, feel the slight
unevenness of the paintwork, really register that funny sensation in your fingertips.
What’s going on here? Why am I surrounded by this stuff?

Now see if you can see yourself as strange. Try looking at your hand and wiggling your
fingers. Do the same exercise of defamiliarisation that you performed with the tool. How
strange that there’s this odd spidery appendage at the end of your arm. Look at all the
odd lines and creases, the hair follicles, the strange irruptions of fingernail at the ends of
those gangly fingers.
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See if you can hold on to this feeling of estrangement. It can be precarious: there’s a
strong tendency to snap back to our familiar habits of thought and perception. Try
stepping outside and walking about in a public place while preserving this feeling. What
are all these people doing? All these buildings and cars and noise – what’s it all for?

Eventually, this experience has to fade and you have to get back to the business of living.
But try to hold on to that memory of bemusement. At its most productive, anxiety can
shake us out of comfortable habits and help us see possibilities – for ourselves and for
the world – that ordinarily escape our notice.

Key points
• For the most part, we comport ourselves according to familiar scripts. We have
daily routines and modes of social interaction, and all of these things fit into a
larger picture of who we are and what our lives mean. We rarely make this picture
explicit or subject it to scrutiny.

• Existential anxiety is the recognition that it doesn’t have to be this way. Nothing in
the structure of our selves or in the structure of the world can dictate to us how we
must live.

• The experience of anxiety is also the experience of radical freedom. We can make
of our lives whatever we choose.

• This experience of freedom is unsettling. It places a tremendous burden on

ourselves to determine who we will be.

• Kierkegaard wrote about anxiety from within the context of Christian theology. For
him, anxiety is the experience of a God-given freedom, and the burden of
responsibility is couched within a Christian conception of eternity.

• Sartre defined anxiety as the experience of freedom, and illustrated it with

examples of vertigo and gambling addiction.

• Heidegger described anxiety as the draining away of the significance of the world.
It prompts the recognition that the significance of things in the world and my own
sense of my life’s purpose are intimately connected.

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Why it matters
I’ve just given you a bunch of tips on how to cultivate anxiety. But surely anxiety is
something we want to avoid? A Google search for ‘anxiety’ turns up pages of information
on anxiety disorders. A healthy soul is thought to be free from anxiety, and people seek
expensive treatments to alleviate its symptoms.

To be clear, clinical anxiety – the kind described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM) and treated by psychiatrists – is not identical to the existential
anxiety that interested Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. And, to be fair, the
philosophers got there first: The Concept of Anxiety was published more than a century
before the first edition of the DSM in 1952. The two overlap, and not coincidentally so,
but you can suffer from clinical anxiety without experiencing it as philosophically
significant, and you can experience existential anxiety without needing psychiatric
treatment.

Existential anxiety is a kind of perception. Psychiatrists regard anxiety as a disorder:

something has gone wrong in the mind, and it needs to be set right so that the patient
can perceive reality unskewed. Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger, by contrast, think
that anxiety helps us see something more clearly, something our ordinary
‘psychologically healthy’ modes of perception obscure. Heidegger, for instance,
describes anxiety as a ‘fundamental mood’, one in which the world as a whole comes
into view. Ordinarily, we’re caught up in our immediate preoccupations. By yanking us
away from those preoccupations, anxiety enables us to see our place in the world more
clearly – it helps us see the proverbial wood for the trees. (Heidegger thinks boredom is
another fundamental mood, and his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics helpfully
provides a 100-page analysis of boredom to get you in the mood.)

We experience anxiety as unpleasant, according to these thinkers, because the truth isn’t
pleasant. But, as that proto-existentialist Jesus of Nazareth said, the truth will set you
free. The discovery that nothing necessitates that you carry on as before can be
paralysing but it can also be liberating. With courage and commitment, you can turn an
encounter with anxiety into an opportunity to explore new possibilities and new ways of
being.

Anxiety has liberatory potential but that doesn’t make it fun. It’s hard work, and runs
against our natural grain, to unshackle ourselves from familiar ways of inhabiting the
world. In recommending anxiety as a valuable teacher, these dour Europeans offer a
counterbalance to the relentless positivity that has become one of the United States’
chief cultural exports. It can feel wonderful to get deeply absorbed in an activity that
matters to you. But if you never lift your head up and confront the question of why it
matters to you, you risk running on happy autopilot all the way to the grave.
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Links & books

Kierkegaard’s seminal analysis of anxiety is in his book The Concept of Anxiety (1844).
Heidegger examines anxiety in §40 of his masterwork Being and Time (1927) and also
gives a somewhat more accessible presentation of the issue in his lecture ‘What Is
Metaphysics?’ (1929). Sartre’s analysis of anxiety is in Part 1, Chapter 1, §5 of his book
Being and Nothingness (1943).

None of these writers is easy to read. A more accessible introduction to existentialist

themes can be found in Gordon Marino’s book The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to
Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age (2018). Sarah Bakewell’s prizewinning At the
Existentialist Café (2016) offers a lively intellectual history of the emergence of a
distinctive philosophy that came to be known as existentialism.

Existential anxiety has had tremendous influence in the arts. Sartre was himself a
novelist and his first novel, Nausea (1938), examines themes related to those discussed
here. Franz Kafka was another author who gave vivid expression to anxiety – his novel
The Trial (1925) is one powerful instance. Anxiety and freedom are also recurring themes
in the work of the playwrights Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. Also of note is the
French New Wave cinema of the mid-20th century. Films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s À
bout de souffle, or Breathless, (1960) and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
also explore existential themes. And if you’d like to hang a little anxiety on your wall,
seek out the work of Edvard Munch or Vincent van Gogh.

The late, great Hubert Dreyfus was a prominent scholar of Heidegger and existential
philosophy, as well as an excellent lecturer. A number of his lecture courses have been
preserved online and are available for streaming.

Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time (1998-) brings together distinguished
experts on a wide array of subjects. Over the years, he has hosted discussions of
existentialism, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and authenticity, another theme that is closely
connected to anxiety.

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22 SEPTEMBER 2021

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