Abstract
This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence (or Dasein) as a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities.
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Notes
The pervasive co-occurrence of depression and anxiety means that temporal acceleration and retardation can occur simultaneously in the same individual. As one woman writes, “It’s like I’m in a fog and can’t fully concentrate. My words are slurred and I feel like I’m in a dream… I feel extra slow like I’m moving in slow motion, but at the same time I can’t hold still. My thoughts are scattered, yet I can’t put them into words… I get nervous to talk to co-workers because I just know my words will come out faster than my brain can put it together to make sense.” (Schuster 2017) This is one of the many reasons that the DSM’s separation of the disorders into two distinct categories is highly problematic. Anxiety and depression not only share common physiological characteristics, hereditary factors, and genetic etiologies (e.g. the production of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine); they generally respond to comparable pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments and have symptomatic similarities, especially in regards to feelings of guilt, shame, and loss of self-control. To this end, I agree with Scott Stossell (2015) who suggests, “The dividing line between this set of disorders… seems to be an artifact as much of politics and culture (and marketing) as of science.” (p. 40)
As a DSM criteria for generalized anxiety disorder, this cognitive impairment may contribute to, among other thing, ‘irritability’, ‘sleep disturbances’, ‘difficulty concentrating’ and ‘[the] mind going blank’ (American Psychiatric Association 2013, 222)
Interestingly, in Being and Time, Heidegger identifies this aspect of public life in terms ‘curiosity’ (Neugier), referring to a pervasive sense of ‘restlessness’ (Unruhe). (1962, 216) He sees it as being symptomatic of the larger socio-cultural upheavals of modernity, where technologically mediated speed, busy-ness, and distractibility creates a situation of chronic sensory arousal and time pressure where “Dasein “never [dwells] anywhere… [and is] constantly uprooting itself.” (p. 217) He will later refer to it as ‘acceleration’ (Schnelligkeit), identifying it as one of the signature features of modernity embodied in a kind of ‘mania’ where “one is unable to bear the stillness” of their own lives. (1999, 83; cf. Aho 2007)
In § 49 of Being and Time, Heidegger makes it clear that ‘dying’ (Sterben) refers to an inability ‘to be’. It is not to be confused with ‘perishing’ (Verenden) or ‘demising’ (Ableben). Verenden refers to the physiological death of the kind we share with animals, and Ableben refers to the uniquely human anxiety that accompanies the subjective awareness of our impending physiological perishing. Sterben, on the other hand, refers to the dying of our ability to exist, that is, to understand or make sense of who we are. This is an event that belongs to the temporal structure Dasein itself. Our identity or self-understanding, on this view, is fragile and always vulnerable to collapse. (cf. Aho 2016; Blattner 1994; Thomson 2013)
As Freeman (2000) explains, “There can be no story without an ending, and there can be no ending without a story.” (p. 88)
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that this longing for narrative stability emerges not just at the temporal but at the spatial, bodily, and intersubjective level as well. The experience of anxiety can disrupt our sense of “ontological security” (Laing 1960), that is, our unconscious and taken for granted state of being ‘at home’, of being habitually integrated, engaged, and bound up in the world. On this view, my identity and experience of reality as a whole is largely held together by this pre-reflective, embodied connection. The erosion of the self emerges when this connection breaks down and the public world reveals itself as unreliable, insecure, and, in severe cases, ‘unreal’. (cf. Aho 2014, 126–132)
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Aho, K. Temporal experience in anxiety: embodiment, selfhood, and the collapse of meaning. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 259–270 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9559-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9559-x