The Rabbit and the Mountain Lion: Anxiety and its Opposite Stuart T. Doyle
[email protected] Is it not intrinsic to the nature of the male, beasts as well as men, to fight and to contend? It’s what we were born to do, it’s in our blood. −Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire The Question What is the opposite of anxiety? The facile answer would be that calmness or tranquility is the opposite of anxiety. That answer is true in a sense, but calmness is mostly just the absence of anxiety. Some opposites are vacuous, merely absences; cold is technically just an absence of its opposite, heat. There is however another kind of opposite; a substantive opposite. For example the opposite of a friend is a foe. A foe is its own sort of entity, not just the absence of a friend. So what is the substantive opposite of anxiety, and what does it do? What does it’s existence imply for the practice of psychiatry and the study of psychology? A starting point for finding the answer is to look more closely at what anxiety is. There are multiple ways to conceptualize anxiety, but for now consider the ethological paradigm in the study of fear and anxiety. This perspective contextualizes fear and anxiety as systems that humans and animals use to defend against threats (Mobbs et al, 2015, p. 1). In short, the answer to ‘what is anxiety’ is answered by shifting the question to ‘why is anxiety.’ Ethologically 1 speaking, anxiety is the physiological, cognitive, and behavioral state which in the past, has made humans and animals ready to deal with potential dangers in the future.