the call of anxiety

In his story, Lovecraft is talking about our mind's capacity to suppress information that might otherwise be traumatic. I'll refrain from going further into that topic here, and allow the curious to explore his writings. That said, Lovecraft touched upon something fundamental about the human mind: our consciousness is limited.

Just how limited? There have been several estimations of this, based on different research. Timothy D. Wilson (2002), in his book Strangers to Ourselves, suggested that our brains are able to process around 11 million bits of information per second. We are conscious of about 40 of them.

That's a pretty huge difference. But it gets even more interesting. Lovecraft was talking about the positive sides of limited consciousness. We can also talk about the not-so-great sides.

Let's look at what happens to your brain when you're feeling anxious or stressed. In simple terms, the stress centre of your brain (amygdala) sends signals to the rational part of your brain (prefrontal cortex) telling it to back off (Arnsten, 2009). This is important. It means that when you're stressed, angry, or anxious, you're not good at:

• logical reasoning,
• impulse control,
• short-term memory.

What does this mean? Welcome to survival mode. You fall back on old patterns and automatic behaviours. Suddenly, you're not interested in nuance or perspective (Goleman, 1995). Things are either safe or dangerous, completely right or completely wrong, all good or all bad.

Made a small mistake that kicked off a trigger? You're going to get fired. He's going to break up with you. You have Tay-Sachs disease. You can feel it. It's real. You know it's true.

You become intensely self-focused and perspective-blind. You're either completely in the right and there's no way the other party/ies could have a point—or you're completely wrong. It was all your fault. You're a total failure, etc. There is only one objective reality.

How did you handle this in the past? Panic? Rapid-fire problem-solving that you can't stop until you've gotten the solution? Rushing off to ChatGPT or Reddit and spending six hours looking for the one response or post that will tell you exactly what you need to do? You don't stop to consider anything else. Now is the time for action! You're going to do what needs to be done. And pity on the person who tries to stop you!

That often includes anyone in the vicinity—especially if it's someone you love.

what's a person to do?

In classic blog post style, this is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how you can solve this in three easy steps. Oh, how I wish it were that simple! Unfortunately, our biology just doesn't make it that easy.

It's not like there's nothing you can do. You can increase your ability to catch yourself before you get lost in a trigger. You can increase your ability to stop yourself when you realise you are triggered. You can reduce the number or intensity of the triggers you have. But none of this can be solved in three easy steps, with my patented breathing technique—despite the endorsement of several people who have seen it change their lives.

We are very complex beings with a lot of moving, interconnected parts who are hard-wired to survive in a natural world "red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson, 1850). Not only is it pretty difficult to override that, I'm not sure that trying to override millions of years of successful evolution is even a great idea. It's probably a lot more effective and sustainable to work with it.

Working with it takes courage, time, patience, and vulnerability.