Curiosity vs. Anxiety

Todd Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, has penned a book entitled Curious?:Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life.

This is not a book review of Kashdan’s work – I promise to never use this forum for such purposes. Rather, this is an examination of the concepts Kashdan posits in his soon-to-be-published work.

Kashdan has long been an anxiety researcher, often specializing in social anxiety, and he saw a correlation in people when it came to their level of anxiety in social situations and their level of interest, or curiosity. From that, Kashdan developed his thesis that curiosity was a counter-motivation to anxiety.

That made sense to me. In the “About KnowFear” section of this blog, I note that for me, anxiety boiled down to its most base component is simply my human “fight or flight” instinct gone a bit haywire. If I may take some song lyrics completely out of context here, Clash summed things up nicely:

Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know, should I stay or should I go?

The same can be said for entering into new situations or environments. There can be a great deal of discomfort associated with the unknown, and for people with anxiety, particularly socially-centered varieties, if there’s not a hook – something that tweaks your interest and makes you want to stay, explore, or learn more – it’s very easy to avoid the new circumstance. Conversely, if there’s something very appealing, or if there’s a measure of curiousity involved, it’s much easier to push aside the desire to avoid or flee.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not simply curiosity on the one hand and anxiety on the other. For me, it’s like a see-saw, or a teeter-totter as they were called where I grew up. Somewhere in the middle is a good balance, a stasis. I would be hard-pressed to find a situation in which I was heartily interested or curious that I would also express anxiety about. Alternately, if I examine situations where I typically experience dread or panic, most often they involve things that I don’t find all that interesting. Of course, that could be chicken-or-egg rationalization on my part, avoidance at many levels.

Kathryn Brittan, who writes in her Positive Psychology Reflections blog, has an in-depth interview with Kashdan if you’re interested, or curious.

Curiosity, an Engine of Well-Being

What would the child you were say to the adult you are?

My husband will often call me over as he’s writing, to show me some fantastical something he’s found as he’s read what you all are writing on the web. More often than not, it’s something akin to the Mc Gang Bang (a McChicken sandwich inside a double cheeseburger) from thisiswhyyourefat.com, but today it was site where Chino Otsuka creates double-portraits, pictures of herself today, overlaid with photos of herself as a child (via Andrew Sullivan’s Blog).

Some time back, when I started the work to live with my eating disorder, a therapist took the group I was part of through a visualization exercise. Being cocky, cynical, and 26, I rolled my eyes before I closed them, but decided to play along. After some breathing exercises she began: “Imagine”, she said, “you are walking down a small pathway. You pass lovely trees and somewhere in the background you hear water trickling over rocks. You have nothing pressing to do; it’s the kind of day that makes your chattering mind stop pestering you, the kind of day that you find yourself fully present.”

“You come around a small bend in the pathway, and see ahead of you a wooden bench, and on that bench, a small child with their back towards you.  The child turns to look at you over their shoulder, and you realize that this child is you, at 5 years old. The child says to you:…” – and she paused. “What,” she asked, “does that child say?”

It was the first time, in months of therapy, that I cried. Out loud. In the dark, my eyes closed, surrounded by women who had been raped, been beaten, been neglected, all with lives any typical person would have said had been far worse than the 26 year old me had lived.

Because the five year old who was me had turned to me  smiling. “What?”, she said, kicking her legs in her yellow dress with pink butterflies made for me with love by my Papa’s girlfriend Pam, “What’s happened to you?”.  She feels so bad that I have chosen this suffering.

Today I’m sitting in my lovely house, with my lovely trees, and in the background instead of the sound of water flowing over rocks I hear the sound of the young business man who does our lawn aerating our backyard. And the five year old girl that no longer sits on some bench in some visualization, but instead in my head, fully there most every day, says to me as my husband shows me Chino Otsuka’s photos, “What’s happened to you?”.

And I laughed when I told this story to my husband, before I cried as I wrote this, because today I’m smiling back at me.

“..everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest