Free Floating Anxiety

Free floating anxiety is a psychiatric term for a type of particularly disabling and pernicious anxiety.  It seems to be autochthonous which means it’s not apparently externally trigger but rises de novo from within. .  A person can switch from feeling secure to having a deep seated sense of insecurity.

Anxiety already is an internal experience of fear.  Fear is a normal and  healthy  survivor mechanisms. I’m afraid of grizzly bears , snakes  and certainly politicians with good reason. I’m not afraid of life but I can be anxious about it.   

Existential angst is the experience of anxiety about existence , about the meaning of life, about one’s purpose.  It arises when we ask the question ‘why’.

Buddha said Desire is the root of all Suffering.  Anxiety relates to the lack of acceptance of a potential. 

When one learns mindfulness meditation one lives in the Present described by the great mystic Brother Lawrence.  Here and now as described by Ram Dass is not normally a place of anxiety.

Anxiety has been described as a measure of one’s distance from God or what is Good and True to one’s self.  It’s equally a measure of one’s humanity.  Anxiety is essential to consciousness,  but like all emotions there is a sweet place, place of balance or equilibrium or centre.   One wishes enough anxiety to avoid being naive about existence and able to act but not so much as to be paralyzed.

Free floating anxiety seems like a hunter seeking prey. It is a self justifying anxiety.  Looking about for an ‘explanation’ for anxiety it can literally latch onto anything. The friend’s tone of voice suggest dissatisfaction with me. The banker looks askance at my bank balance.  A Soldier says that there is war and rumor of war in the Middle East and Crimea.  A person tells a story of a lawyer and accountant ganging up to steal money from them through fraud. An announcement comes that the government has spent the pension funds.  Inflation is halving the fixed incomes. There is a pain in the side, minor for sure, but it might be cancer. Free floating anxiety is like a bird that wants to land on something to justify itself.  

The population is anxious. The book, Alcoholic Republic describes the vast extent of alcohol production and sale in America during it’s short history.  Marijuana is increasingly being legalized to help people ‘cope’ with ‘anxiety.   Anxiety and depression are principal factors in the epidemic of mental illness. Some might argue that some depression is but prolonged anxiety, chronic anxiety. The use and distribution of opium and hashish and marijuana give a long history of search and use of anxiety reducing and avoiding chemicals, botanical or otherwise.  The sales of benzodiazepine or atypical major tranquillisers or antidepressant anti anxiety medications involve billions of dollars.   

I was reviewing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and reflecting that never before have more people avoided the horseman of Malthus, War, Famine and Disease as today.  Billions of people on the planet living longer and healthier  lives than ever before.  Our physiological and security needs met but so many lacking a sense of belonging or missing love or looking for love in all the wrong places.  Eric Erickson talked of Identity and identity confusion and isolation and alienation.. The addiction crisis is a product of the wealth and luxury predominantly in the west where people not only have time to kill themselves but the money to afford the means and little responsibility for their fellow man or woman. 

Strange times.

Free floating anxiety.  Distinct from panic attacks, generalized anxiety or the phobias.  But there it is.  Where will the hunter prey. Where will the bird settle.