The Science of Anxiety Disorders Part 6

The impact of disordered anxiety and the influence of mood

How does Disordered Anxiety impact our Psychological Energy?

When our anxiety becomes disordered it begins to consume our psychological energy. Psychological energy is described as the actuating force in the mind or the psychological feature that moves an organism to act. This view poses that psychological energy is the presence of unconscious mental functioning that exists and operates on a level between biology and consciousness. This belief goes as far back as Aristotle who posed the theory that the potency of the mind was connected to the action of the body. This idea supports the notion that the body follows the mind. Given this understanding we can see that psychological energy plays a critical role surrounding human survival and quality of life. The human mind requires specific measures of psychological energy to maintain an emotional and mental equilibrium or balance that is more commonly known as mental health. Should the psychological energy levels dip below the critical level the mind goes into a state of psychological distress. Psychological energy takes form in the human mind in what is known as the 5–Wells of the Soul.

What are the 5-Wells of the Soul?

The 5-Wells include:

Hope – One’s belief in a more positive outcome. One’s faith in a better tomorrow. One’s vision of a future that is both thriving and fulfilling.

Worth – One’s inherent possession of the value and sanctity of one’s life. One’s ownership of a dignity born from divine inspiration. One’s sense of the majesty regarding the rarity of one’s being.

Purpose – One’s spiritual mission. One’s destination towards one’s original shape and the divine intention of you. One’s process of becoming a part of the bigness completing the circle of life by achieving wholeness through one’s destiny contribution.

Resourcefulness – One’s capacity to create approaches to resolving challenges and set-backs. One’s ability to recover from disappointment injury, and loss. One’s ability to restore normal levels of functioning.

Will-Power – One’s ability to assert individual choices in the face of strong opposition or adversity. One’s individual strength to overcome inner compensatory drives and impulses such as gluttony, greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth and anger. One’s ability to endure effort (the spending of energy) and suffering (the loss of energy due to illness, injury and/or violation) beyond one’s normal limits.

This psychological energy that resides within the 5-Wells of the Souls is required by each human mind to meet the demands of the day. These demands are called external stressors. To clarify this process let’s say that the average stressor load for the average human being is approximately 75-units per day.

Let’s say that each well of the soul contains 20-units of energy x’s 5-wells equals the notion that each human mind starts the day with 100-units of energy. This would leave the average mind with 25-units of energy at days end. The Wells will then re-energize during the process of sleep and much like a battery that has been recharged the individual will start the next day back to that restored measure of 100-units of psychological energy.

The ability of the human mind to re-energize itself suggests that the mind or psyche is both potent and resilient meaning that the mind is powerful and able to both spend and restore its power source. The spending of psychological energy is occurring throughout the day as we solve survival and survival maintenance problems. These life maintenance problems or stressors (such as comfort demands, hygiene demands, work demands, social demands, intimacy demands, education demands, parenting demands) coming at the individual mind from the external universe are both constant and persistent.

One way to picture the constant stream of external stressors is the Arthurian vision of king and kingdom. The custom in this bygone era was that all the people in the kingdom would stream into throne room to petition the king for a dollop of the kingdom’s energy. The line of people with intent to petition the king could stretch for miles and continue for days. Such is our daily plight with our own external stressors meaning that you are the King or the Queen giving out dollops of your psychological energy to each external stressor that petitions you. By days end the Kingdoms coffers are all but spent. Yet magically when come the morning light you check in on the treasury and find that the chests and strong boxes are filled to the brim with silver and gold.

Anxiety disorders acting much like a blackholes in the mind become an internal force that by their nature will consume large quantities of psychological energy. It is the intrusive and reductive nature of disordered anxiety that leads these disorders to become debilitating sources of psychological distress. Over time their ability to severely deplete the energy in the mind causes what is called an acute state of psychological distress. This acute state of psychological distress occurs when the psychological energy goes into the negatives and is unable to recover ground zero.

For example, anxiety disorders will make daily energy consumption demands of the five wells consuming up to 8-units of energy per well. The anxious individual then wakes up with 60-units of energy rather than the customary 100-units. This means that the anxiety disordered individual must now face the day’s stressors with only 60-units of psychological energy. Given that the average stressor demand per day consumes 75-units the result for the anxiety ridden individual is minus 15-units of psychological energy by days end. This state of depletion tends to increase anxiety levels as the individual now feels unable to handle the demands of the day. This anxiety then causes more energy depletion leading the individual into a state of acute psychological distress as the depletion of psychological energy cycles into negative energy measures from which the individual is unable to recover.

What is known about the influence of mood on anxiety disorders?

When our anxiety becomes disordered the high adrenalin levels coupled with the practice of worry tend to create a restless mood. This Restlessness sends the body the message that there is something urgent that needs to be addressed, something important that needs to be done. The body then responding to this mood produces more adrenalin (biochemistry of anxiety) which feeds the worry machine (psychology of anxiety) which then in turn generates more restlessness (mood of anxiety). When the restless mood becomes normalized mood becomes the third cylinder in a cycle designed to generate increasing measures of anxiety. Overtime as the body spins with exaggerated measures of adrenalin and the mind fixates on the practice of worrying, restlessness becomes the default position for the anxious individual’s mood.

Once the restless mood has established residence within those who struggle with anxiety disorders this edgy state of consciousness may become dominant showing up without due cause and intruding uninvited on otherwise lazy and serene moments of relaxation. This means that even if we reduce the adrenalin and curtail the worrying the default feeling of restlessness may pay us a visit pulling us back onto that anxiety treadmill at the most inopportune times.

The ability of our mood to imprint upon our mind is much like the penny that you press upon your forehead for 60- seconds. We take away the penny and yet the impression of the penny is still felt for some time after the coin was removed. When we consider the return of restlessness even when there is nothing to worry about, we might consider how long it might take to no longer sense the imprint of that coin that had been held in place there for more than 1-year. We do know that the influence of the mood on the cycle of anxiety is far less when the biology and the psychology of anxiety have been treated with medication and psychotherapy. The restless mood is best treated by engaging in exercises and activities that summon alternative moods that surround relaxation. These activities will activate the parasympathetic nervous system which in turn will produce oxytocin calming the mind and the body. This mood summoning practice works best when we resist the restlessness by refusing to engage in adrenalin producing exercises that generally surround the activity of worrying. This means that if we worry while we engage in relaxation, we defeat the purpose. To this end when pursuing the state of contentment worry-free relaxation is highly recommended.