Here’s a question? What’s scarier: reality or imagination? The crazy thing is that even though we know that imagination is not real, it can often cause more suffering than reality.
The reason for this is the human stress response. Stress is the body’s way of responding to and protecting itself from a threat. When I know what’s out there – a bear, a raging river, a pit of snakes – I can protect myself from the danger. When the danger isn’t known, I have no idea what I need to do. My stress response goes into hyper-alert mode as a means of protection. This is why the unknown is so stressful. (It is also why people have such a hard time with change.)
An interesting thing about stress and anxiety is how most of us deal far better in a real crisis than we would have thought.
I once had a client with a fairly serious case of Crone’s disease. As bad as it was, it barely registered on his radar. As a hypochondriac, he was far more worried about an infinite number of other possible conditions he could have – many of which were less serious than his Crone’s.
Such is the nature of imagination. It is pretty fertile.
Here is my column from last week. It explores some of these issues.
Cancer or fear of cancer
(Source: Le cancer ou la peur du cancer? Journal Métro, June 29, 2010)
Would you rather have cancer or a fear of cancer?
Whenever I speak to an audience about anxiety, I always ask the above question. Given the choice, the vast majority of them respond they would rather have the fear of cancer than the actual disease. From the outside it’s a no-brainer. We can easily see that one of the options is a deadly disease while the other is “just a fear.”
This is when I ask the follow-up question. What if the fear made you believe you really had cancer, would you feel better or worse than the person with the actual disease? This is why there is always a small minority of audience members – those with a history of debilitating anxiety – who indicate they would rather have the cancer.
Reality versus imagination
Anxiety is a mechanism that works well to protect us from real or potential dangers. Our imaginations help us prepare for as many of them as possible. Unfortunately there are few greater dangers than the ones conjured up by the limitless imagination of the fertile human brain. This is, by the way, the reason movies are rarely as captivating as the books on which they are based. An alien creature in your mind is always scarier than an actor in an alien suit on screen.
When imagination – and the anxiety it produces – is taken out of the equation, we can be more rational about our situations. It is for this reason that unknown threats are usually more difficult to deal with than known ones. In the cancer example, a person with the disease may have a treatable case. Even when it isn’t, the patient often can accept the inevitable and adopt a “one-day-at-a-time” attitude.
People who are afraid they have cancer, on the other hand, never imagine that it is treatable. They always imagine drawn-out, agonizing, and certain deaths. There is no opportunity for optimism or a positive outlook in the mind of an anxious individual.
Anxiety is a motor that drives us to protect ourselves from dangers. Unfortunately, without the ability to separate reality from imagination, our anxiety mechanism can go from protecting us to torturing us.
Anxiety is a film that can paint some scary pictures. This is why we must be able to step back from our emotions and recognize that fear is ultimately in our minds. After all, a scary movie is still only a movie.
Tagged as Anxiety, cancer, crisis, Crone's disease, danger, fear of cancer, fear of fear, human brain, hypochondriac, imagination, imagined fears, Journal Métro, protection, reality, Stress, Stress response, stressful, threat.
Posted on 10 Jul 2010
