Turning Toward Anxiety

Turning Toward Anxiety

To everyone stressed about tomorrow, I hope you find joy in today.

This is not therapy, and it is not a replacement for it. If you are struggling with anxiety, a licensed professional can offer you something I cannot: a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and a person in the room. What follows is philosophy and testimony, my theories about myself, my mind, and the Self. The numbers are at the top of the page on purpose. You are not alone, and reaching out is a sign of strength.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

Experienced: lived, and I am the only witness. Observed: watched in others, with their details anonymized or left out. Studied: read in the literature, and cited at the back.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

Look at how far we’ve come. Or rather, how far I’ve come.

Turning Toward has been testimony woven with fact, but the largest point I want you to hold is that most of these thoughts are about me. Where the On ——ing series weighed the viewpoints of other people and other times, Turning Toward turns the lens back on myself, as an author and as a real person, to show you how I chose, in my own way, to be better. It has never been a replacement for therapy. It has only ever been my theories about myself, my mind, and the Self.

I’ve lived with anxiety for as long as I can remember. It’s been an underlying theme of my neurodivergence for most of my life. I’ll be honest, though: I was never formally diagnosed. For years I underreported my symptoms to doctors, because I was afraid of what certain pharmaceuticals might do to me. Early on, someone gave me something to help me “chill out.” In Turning Toward Addiction I said I never blacked out on alcohol alone, and that’s true, but I’ll admit here that a single beer taken alongside that one pill was enough to erase a night from my memory. The people I was with kept me safe, and made sure I did no harm to myself or anyone else. I’ve thought a lot, since, about what might have happened if they hadn’t been there.

That was enough for me. I don’t like not remembering. If I can’t remember something, I can’t learn from it. Brain poison is the name I’ve quietly attached to those moments.

Anxiety is hard to put your finger on, because it keeps moving around.

In Turning Toward Depression I offered a theory: that much of the depression I’ve known was tied to the past, to old mistakes, to traumas, and to the outcomes those things went on to have in my life. I’ll make the same clarification here that I made there. Trauma, harm done to you, is not a mistake you made. Don’t let those two things fuse together in your head. Your traumas are not your failures, even though your failures can sometimes be traumatizing.

So, in time, I’ve come to stand on the other side of my depression, my addiction, and my suicidal thoughts. And here I am now, standing at the door of anxiety.

I’m going to be largely metaphorical with this one. I’m going to reach for an image I’ve been living inside, without quite realizing it, ever since I got my driver’s license. I’m going to compare anxiety to the thinking behind driving a car.

But first, the theory itself.

The scale

Where depression, for me, lived mostly in the past, I’ve found that anxiety lives mostly in the future. That’s not to say the past has no hand in it. The outcomes of our decisions can send us bouncing back and forth between depression and anxiety, like the needle on a two-pan balance after you’ve dropped a weight on one side. Back and forth, never quite sure where to rest.

Hold onto that image, because the whole point of a balance scale is to find the balance between two things. In my head, those two things are the past and the future.

Because you’re meant to be living in the present.

I found, when I went looking, that I’m not the first to feel my way toward something like this. On my reading, Jung tended to treat anxiety and depression less as diseases in their own right than as signals: surface expressions of something deeper moving underneath. He described psychic energy as something that can flow forward, adapting us to the world and its demands, or flow backward, pulling us down into older material we haven’t finished with. He called these progression and regression (Jung, 1969, para. 60). The backward pull he tied, again and again, to the past: “a relapse into the past caused by a depression in the present” (Jung, 1967, para. 625). The fear that meets the forward movement he tied to the risk of stepping out into an uncertain life: “the perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life” (Jung, 1967, para. 165).¹

That maps, almost eerily, onto my two-pan scale. Depression as the backward pull. Anxiety as the fear that meets us when we face forward, toward the not-yet. And the present, the fulcrum, as the only place we actually get to live. Jung even had a name for the thing that holds that tension and makes something new out of it: the transcendent function, the quiet engine of becoming whole (Jung, 1969, paras. 131–193).² I want to mark the seam plainly: Jung never wrote it out as a neat pair, anxiety equals future, depression equals past. That symmetry is my inference, built on his scaffolding. But the scaffolding holds.

And I’m in good company beyond Jung. Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom”: the vertigo we feel standing at the edge of our own open future, looking down into everything we might do (Kierkegaard, 1844/1980, p. 61). Anxiety, in that light, isn’t a malfunction. It’s the price of being able to imagine forward at all.

But sometimes we forget we’re supposed to be here. Our minds drift. We start turning over things that don’t matter in this moment.

Does the future matter? Of course it does. We need food and water. We need shelter from the weather. We’ve built an entire empire around securing those simple things. I joke with my loved ones sometimes: “It’s funny how we’re the only mammals who go into debt just trying to survive.”

But are we so separate from the rest of it? I think about the empire we’ve built around survival, and what it costs the living systems around us. Sometimes I think about jays, and I wonder whether the earth might set the right fruit in front of us at the right time, if only we understood it and respected it enough to notice. That’s a speculation, and I’ll name it as one. But it isn’t baseless. There is a real body of knowledge here. Many Indigenous peoples, in British Columbia for one, have long read the flowering of one plant or the return of one bird as the signal that another food is ready to gather, so that human work fell into step with what the land was already offering, season by season (Lantz & Turner, 2003). The stronger claim, that nature would provide for us if we treated it rightly, is mine, and I’ll own it as philosophy. The quieter truth under it, that living systems move in patterns we can learn to keep time with, is not.

And here’s something that isn’t speculation at all: we have already, measurably, changed the bodies of the creatures living alongside us. Lizards in Puerto Rican cities have evolved longer limbs and more gripping scales on their toe pads to hold onto our smooth walls (Winchell et al., 2016). Peppered moths turned dark to match soot-blackened trees, and have been turning pale again since the air cleared (Cook et al., 2012). Mice in New York City parks carry genetic signatures of adapting to us (Harris & Munshi-South, 2017). Birds in loud cities sing at a higher pitch just to be heard over our traffic (Slabbekoorn & Peet, 2003).³ Whole species have bent themselves around the fact of us. Evolution is real, but I’ve come to think it’s part of the design, not separate from it.

See how quickly a mind can wander off the road when it isn’t watching where it’s going?

I’ve digressed hard. But I’ll leave that ecology where it sits, for you to chew on. It matters just as much as the rest.

Where it comes from

One more stop before the car, because it’s the stop this whole series keeps pulling into.

Where did my anxiety come from? I used to answer that the way most people do: I was born with it. I’m wired this way. And some of that is true. Anxiety runs in families, and part of what runs is genetic.

But I’ve come to believe the larger part is handed down. Not born. Inherited from the adults standing around us, in the oldest way there is: by watching them.

Babies learn what to fear by reading our faces. Put a one-year-old at the edge of what looks like a drop (a sheet of glass over a patterned floor), and whether the baby crawls across depends heavily on the face of the mother on the other side. When she shows fear, almost none of them cross. When she smiles, most of them do (Sorce et al., 1985). In another study, infants watched their mothers greet a stranger either calmly or anxiously. Afterward, the babies were more fearful and avoidant of that stranger when the mother had modeled anxiety, especially the babies who were already a little shy (de Rosnay et al., 2006).⁴ Children can even learn to fear an animal they have never met, just by seeing pictures of it next to a frightened face (Askew & Field, 2008).

That’s the lab. Here’s the strongest evidence I know of from outside it. Researchers studied the children of identical and fraternal twins, a design that lets you pull apart what a parent passes down in their genes from what a parent passes down in the house. For anxiety, the link between parent and child ran mostly through the environment, not the genes (Eley et al., 2015). The child was not mostly born anxious. The child mostly learned it from the anxious adult across the room.

Jung would not have been surprised. He believed a small child is “psychologically more or less identical with its environment, and especially with its parents,” a state he called participation mystique (Jung, 1954, para. 253). The baby at the glass isn’t deciding to be afraid. For a moment, the baby is the mother’s face.

I’ll hold all of this honestly: genes matter (twin studies put the heritability of generalized anxiety at around a third) (Hettema et al., 2001), and nobody’s anxiety is any one person’s fault. But read the finding again with the car in mind. If a child learns the road by watching the driver, then the most important thing an anxious adult can do for a child is learn to drive differently. And that, it turns out, is good news. Because a habit that was learned can be relearned.

Let’s get back in the car.

The road

The first thing I want to tell you is how I used to struggle with road rage, and how I let it go. Imagine it with me. You’re late, for work, for an appointment, doesn’t matter which. You put the destination into your GPS, and it tells you plainly that you’re going to be fifteen minutes late.

The drive is thirty miles. The speed limit is seventy.

Here’s the thing that took me a long time to really see. At seventy miles an hour, thirty miles takes about twenty-six minutes. That’s the whole trip. So to claw back fifteen of those minutes, to shave more than half the journey off, you would have to cover those thirty miles in about eleven minutes. Do the arithmetic and it comes to roughly 168 miles an hour. Sustained. The entire way.

There is no number on your speedometer that gets you there. It isn’t a risky choice you could make if you were brave or reckless enough. It is simply not a thing that can happen in a normal car. The fifteen minutes are already gone. No amount of pressing the pedal brings them back; it only trades them for danger, because the returns on speed collapse fast. Past a point, all that extra velocity buys you is a few seconds and a much worse chance of arriving at all. Speeding is a factor in nearly three in ten deaths on American roads (National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2025).⁵

So be fifteen minutes late. Make the conscious choice to be safe.

I try to hold that same lens over the whole timeline of a life. We get so fixed on reaching the finish that we forget the drive was the point. Stop and smell the roses, people say, and we snap back, “That’s stupid, I have places to be.” Do we, though? Why are we all in such a hurry? The destination, in a car or in a life, is not the point. Arriving whole is the point. You cannot outrun a lateness that has already happened. You can only decide who you’ll be for the rest of the drive.

Now let’s talk about what’s happening around us on that road, because this is the part my stepfather taught me when he taught me to drive, and it’s the part I’d hand to you if I could hand you only one thing.

You can be the finest driver alive and still have someone come out of nowhere and hit you. So you pay attention. To everything. All the time.

When I drive, I try to show my wife how I can read the other cars. Not predict the future, nothing like a magic trick. Just watch. Most people follow the flow of traffic. A little over the limit, maybe, but steady, no trouble. But some have a pattern. Weaving. No turn signals. Trying to get somewhere they can’t be yet. I know that pattern from the inside, because I used to be that pattern. I was the teenager a police officer once pulled out of a whole pack of speeders, not because I was fastest, but because I was the one weaving. He let me off with a warning. I never forgot it.

Once I spot one of those drivers, I realize they’re the only one I really need to watch. I’ll tell my wife a few seconds before it happens: “Look at this person.” And then they do the dangerous thing. I didn’t see the future. Someone just taught me, a long time ago, to notice the shape of trouble before it arrives. That’s the inheritance working the right way: a calm adult, handing a kid a way to see.

Hold that lens over a whole life, and see how it feels.

The missed turn

The last thing I want to leave you with came out of a conversation with someone I love, about missing a turn.

We program the destination. The GPS gives us an arrival time, drawn from everyone who has ever driven that road and everyone driving it now, and we accept it. Sometimes it reroutes us, sends us a way we didn’t plan to go. When that happens, it’s usually because of what my wife and I call a fresh situation: something up ahead we can’t see yet.

Let it be.

If you miss a turn, the GPS simply reroutes you. It’ll even tell you, calmly, how to turn around. Most missed exits cost you a couple of minutes and nothing more. The whole grid is built to be redrawn. There is always another turn.

Sometimes I let myself believe I missed a turn for a reason: that there was a fresh situation up ahead I’ll never know about, and missing the turn kept me out of it. I can’t prove that. It’s just a thing I tell myself so I don’t fill up with anger over an honest mistake. And it works. We keep going. When we choose wrong, there is almost always another path.

So don’t stress. Don’t spend today worrying about a shadow you won’t reach for days. I made this point once with a light bill: why pour yourself out worrying over something you can’t touch or change in this moment? It isn’t an easy way to think, and I won’t pretend I flip it on like a switch. But when I can get there, it brings a peace I don’t have better words for.

Let life carry you through it, instead of forever shoving out ahead into parts unknown. Forgive yourself the small mistakes, and drive on.

For a long time, anxiety was something I tried to smother by any means I could find. This is the “falling off the mountain” I’ve written about: not knowing which side you’ll land on. There were stretches where I was so anxious I turned right back to depression, or to addiction, just to stop feeling it. I want to be careful and human about this next part, because everyone’s anxiety is different, and some of it needs real clinical care that no metaphor can stand in for. What shifted for me, over a long time and with a lot of stumbling, was less a single decision than a slow, practiced turning-toward: learning, drive by drive, to meet the feeling differently instead of fleeing it. That’s my path, not a prescription. Maybe you’ll find your own parallel somewhere in these traces.

Love yourself first. Then love others. And remember that most people don’t see these things the way you and I are learning to.

So maybe next time, you let the anxious driver pass. Maybe you even make a small, kind joke about how badly they need to be somewhere. You watch them botch the merge up ahead. And you notice that yes, they got there a few seconds before you, and you were the happier of the two the whole way there.

And if there’s a kid in the back seat, they noticed too.

Try applying that to a life.

♥

Notes

1. Jung is writing about neurosis here, not about anxiety as such; the application is mine.

2. “The Transcendent Function” was written in 1916 and first published in 1958.

3. The birds’ change is likely learned flexibility rather than genetic evolution.

4. The mothers were not anxious themselves; they were trained to act anxious for the study, which is what makes the result causal.

5. In 2023, 11,775 deaths, 29 percent of all traffic fatalities, were speeding-related.

References

Askew, C., & Field, A. P. (2008). The vicarious learning pathway to fear 40 years on. Clinical Psychology Review, 28(7), 1249–1265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2008.05.003

Cook, L. M., Grant, B. S., Saccheri, I. J., & Mallet, J. (2012). Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: The last experiment of Michael Majerus. Biology Letters, 8(4), 609–612. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2011.1136

de Rosnay, M., Cooper, P. J., Tsigaras, N., & Murray, L. (2006). Transmission of social anxiety from mother to infant: An experimental study using a social referencing paradigm. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(8), 1165–1175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.09.003

Eley, T. C., McAdams, T. A., Rijsdijk, F. V., Lichtenstein, P., Narusyte, J., Reiss, D., Spotts, E. L., Ganiban, J. M., & Neiderhiser, J. M. (2015). The intergenerational transmission of anxiety: A children-of-twins study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 172(7), 630–637. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.14070818

Harris, S. E., & Munshi-South, J. (2017). Signatures of positive selection and local adaptation to urbanization in white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus). Molecular Ecology, 26(22), 6336–6350. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.14369

Hettema, J. M., Neale, M. C., & Kendler, K. S. (2001). A review and meta-analysis of the genetic epidemiology of anxiety disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(10), 1568–1578. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.10.1568

Jung, C. G. (1954). The development of personality (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 17). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 5). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety: A simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin (R. Thomte & A. B. Anderson, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1844)

Lantz, T. C., & Turner, N. J. (2003). Traditional phenological knowledge of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia. Journal of Ethnobiology, 23(2), 263–286.

National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2025). Speeding: 2023 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 813 721). National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813721

Slabbekoorn, H., & Peet, M. (2003). Birds sing at a higher pitch in urban noise. Nature, 424(6946), 267. https://doi.org/10.1038/424267a

Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.21.1.195

Winchell, K. M., Reynolds, R. G., Prado-Irwin, S. R., Puente-Rolón, A. R., & Revell, L. J. (2016). Phenotypic shifts in urban areas in the tropical lizard Anolis cristatellus. Evolution, 70(5), 1009–1022. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12925

CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT

© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC