What is anxiety, and how does consciousness affect anxiety?
In general anxiety is basically a state of stress. The state of stress is an instinctual reaction triggering neurochemical reinforcement to avoid factors. This instinctual drive would generally evolve for species to avoid factors in their environment which are likely to cause harm.
Consciousness can cause more scenarios for anxiety to be triggered, and also more capability to reduce anxiety. As I mentioned in my last post; Conscious emotional connection, conscious thought allows a much wider variety of factors to be focused on, and make more accurate connections of cause and effect than basic subconscious reactions. This wider variety of factors accessed in memory can cause both more potential factors to trigger anxiety, and more accurate understanding to reduce anxiety.
There are plenty of examples of conscious awareness causing more anxiety. Such as awareness of an individual's difficult financial situation and the connecting cause and effect of factors that being in debt may cause them to lose the place they live or not be able to afford groceries next week. Without conscious comprehension, the individual would likely not have anxiety or be stressed if they are in a house with food in the fridge, since the perception of shelter and easy-access food would trigger contentedness. Only conscious thought would allow perception of the future situation which may result from lack of finances.
A larger scale example of a trigger of conscious anxiety could be awareness of climate change, or potential or ongoing war. Or even awareness of a lying, deceiving, narcissistic, sociopath running (and ruining) your country and slowly implementing more laws to gain more control while pretending the laws are for some mainstream shallow fake virtue, and suppressing the rights of citizens (if you can relate directly to that 1, you might live in Canada (or any other country in a similar situation). Without conscious comprehension of these complex scenarios, the mind would not trigger the stress reinforcement trigger to avoid such situations.
Conscious awareness can also trigger anxiety in situations where it is irrational, and there is no actual harm or risk of harm to the individual, or need to avoid the factors. Irrational anxiety is caused by the mistaken perception of harmful factors. These situations are often where conscious comprehension can reduce anxiety once an accurate perception of the factors is understood. But sometimes conscious awareness to some degree, of factors, causes the mistaken perception of factors of risk or harm, when there is a lack of complete accurate comprehension.
A simple example of conscious awareness reducing anxiety could be learning what thunder is and that it causes no harm, after being scared as a child. Or if you go to a pet store with snakes, you might have high anxiety from seeing the snakes, but the anxiety could be reduced once you learn that the snakes are not venomous and they are trained and have learned to be friendly.
On the other hand, an example where a higher degree of consciousness can cause more irrational anxiety could be self consciousness and social anxiety. With a lack of consciousness, such as typical animals, there is no self awareness or awareness of others perceiving them, and therefore no anxiety from that. Whereas humans, and some individuals to higher degrees than others, are self aware and aware of others perception of them. Of course this doesn't always trigger anxiety, but for many it does, and is often irrational, as a mistaken perception of risk of harm.
The subconscious reinforcement of avoidance in these concepts, is likely triggered by instinct to be fearful of, and to avoid others perceiving you do something wrong. This likely developed as an instinct because tribes or groups would likely kick out or abandon someone that does something wrong, so that individual would be left on their own, at much greater risk in most environments. So for a lot of people (including significantly myself while growing up), a higher degree of conscious awareness of oneself and of others perceivance of them, would cause many more scenarios to trigger anxiety, and a higher degree of anxiety. In most situations this anxiety is completely irrational since the individual is doing nothing wrong, so there's no need to avoid others’ perceivance, and most of the time others perceiving them do something incorrect, is not a bad thing, as then improvements can be made. Interestingly, further and more accurate conscious comprehension can then reduce the same anxiety (such as by comprehending this concept itself), and with conditioning, eventually rid the irrational anxiety.
So it seems, since consciousness allows perception of many more factors and concepts, it can cause more anxiety in both rational and irrational situations. In the scenarios where more conscious awareness causes more irrational anxiety, further and more accurate conscious comprehension of cause and effect of involved factors, can then reverse and reduce the anxiety. Without consciousness, there is anxiety, and with consciousness there is anxiety. But the most optimal scenario is accurate and effective conscious comprehension to be aware of actual risks of harm, yet not worry about mistaken perceptions of harm. The overall best method seems to be the use of Conscious Anxiety.
