AnxietySome of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold, and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will eventually get it. People who have fallen into a recursive trap never get it, because their distorted interpretation provokes them to respond in a way that confirms the pathogenic bias.Negative emotional states are not necessarily pathological. Fear, for example, is an adaptive reaction to threat. The emotional reaction that results from an encounter with an objective threat, a poisonous snake for example, is adaptive in that it prepares one for reality based action, and tends to dissipate after the threat has passed. The fearful emotional state produced by worrying about, “What if some hideous thing happened?” is different. Here the emotional state was elicited by events going on in the worrier’s mind, and so does not dissipate once a threat has passed. Rather than energizing adaptive behavior, the emotional state evoked by worry has the sole function of sapping the resources required to deal with objective threats. So worrying is maladaptive in that is taxes the body’s resources required to respond to threat without protecting the body from any actual threats. Even though many understand that their worries are neither helpful nor related to objective threats, their worrying gets worse with time rather than better. Generalized Anxiety Disorder [the technical term for a chronic worrier] provides a good example of a recursive structure. Many psychological disorders share this structure, including depressive and addictive disorders, and it may explain why people continue to act counter to their own interests. Blushing is an example of a recursive structure. If blushing is embarrassing for me, then any feedback that I am blushing enhances the physiological reaction. The more obvious the blush, the more embarrassed I feel, and the more embarrassed I feel, the more I blush, and so on. The story below illustrates how such a bias can influence an individual's life story. A Bad Bias for Barry's Biography: Barry worries about his social performance – his consciousness if full of thoughts and images of being unable to cope with the social challenges he expects to encounter at the Friday office party. The more he thinks such thoughts, the more anxious he becomes; the more anxious he is, the less able he is to perform well in social situations. Believing he is unable to cope with social challenges biases his performance in ways that confirm his pathogenic belief! Because of its recursive structure, his self-sabotaging tendencies can persist indefinitely. Barry’s expectation of social failure is continually validated by objective evidence: He is unappealing in social situations. This pathogenic recursive structure will continue to bias his actions and how his life unfolds, until he acts to change it. This web site provides expert information and tools designed to help the user escape pathogenic influences and act in accord with your principles and best interests. To sample our tools and methods please register.
- Charles Spurgeon |