Space, Time and Anxiety

In relationship to pervasive anxiety an alternative explanation is as follows:

• Anxiety is naturally occurring in humans and the human population – it must have been of some functional value when we were nomads and I imagine its functional value has changed over time.
• Human experience is processed cognitively, through the propositions or analogies of space and time, or more particularly our cognition processes space and time as information and vice versa.
• The spatial proposition about human experience in relatively simple terms means we experience ourselves, others and events as located on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of our body – two very simple analogies that must at all times remain recursively arranged and in balance, equilibrium.
• Some events throw us out of balance. Some of us are more easily thrown out of balance. No matter what, if the ‘inside’ is privileged over the ‘outside’, by us or others, such an imbalance becomes potentially difficult and inclined to produce symptoms such as anxiety or depression.
• Such an imbalance privileges individual cognition over collective cognition. The opposite can be true. When an individual privileges the ‘inside’ analogy of human experience over the outside, the feedback loop between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ is compromised leaving us preoccupied with the ‘inside’ of your head. Individuals may also have the kind of cognition, intellect, and head vulnerable to such preoccupation.
• The corruption of the spatial analogy produces anxiety – anxiety in turn corrupts the spatial analogy of human experience and events – and so life goes on.
• As humans we are temporal and it is unlikely something as significant as anxiety is not temporal, in part at the very least.
• Time past, time present, and time future as representations of human experience are arranged recursively, each informing and inventing the other. When time is thrown out of balance, when the temporal is dislodged from its implicit recursion, humans become symptomatic.
• In representations of human experience time and space warp, anxiety appears in humans, time future evaporates, leaving the individual human high and dry, preoccupied in time present and perhaps preoccupied or appropriated by time past. No matter how it is put, time is thrown out of balance, the recursion that is us at our best, past, present and future is dislodged.
• Dealing with anxiety involves rehabilitating space and time – bringing both back into balance, recovering lost recursion, temporal and spatial.
• The best way to do both of these is in the negative. The future is best invented by making a decision about what the future will not include and then inventing a strategy to give you effect to that. Equally, the same can be said about ‘outside’ space. Consciously implementing the negative will leave the way wide open for naturally occurring spontaneity and all that is good and right about you and those who travel with you to do its own natural business.
• ‘Inside’ space privileges individual, heroic cognition – ‘outside’ space is collective cognition. An individual’s way out of this anxiety is through collective cognition and the invention of time future – one’s larger group going forward – and what that future will not include.