Highly anticipated …

Someone once noted, “There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.”

Welcome to America in 2023!

Before the global pandemic, America was suffering from a mental health crisis; the pandemic acted as an accelerant on that, resulting in the crisis morphing into a mental health disaster.

From that, what is the most commonly diagnosed mental health issue? Anxiety disorders. And working its way to the top of anxiety issues is the skyrocketing diagnosis of “anticipatory anxiety” — it’s the diagnosis that is crippling America.

Yes, millions of Americans are racked with anxiety over what they anticipate.

Someone once said, “If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.” It isn’t just that we greatly magnify the anticipation (rational or not) of trouble, we more often than not anticipate only the possibility or potential of troubles that, also more often than not, never become realities. It’s like this story told by William Marshall in “Eternity Shut in a Span”:

“For several years a woman had been having trouble getting to sleep at night because she feared burglars. One night her husband heard a noise in the house, so he went downstairs to investigate. When he got there, he did find a burglar. ‘Good evening,’ said the man of the house. ‘I am pleased to see you. Come upstairs and meet my wife. She has been waiting 10 years to meet you.'”

Although the woman’s anticipated trouble finally occurred, for 10 years her negative and irrational anticipation only stoked fear and robbed her of rest and peace. For many, such negative anticipation can become debilitating or paralyzing, a common impact of negative anticipation (or worry) noted by Walter Kelly:

“Worry [negative anticipation] is faith in the negative, trust in the unpleasant, assurance of disaster and belief in defeat … worry is wasting today’s time to clutter up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles. A dense fog that covers a seven-city-block area one hundred feet deep is composed of less than one glass of water divided into sixty thousand million drops. Not much is there but it can cripple an entire city. When I don’t have anything to worry about, I begin to worry about that.”

A real and serious trouble in America is that we’ve crafted a culture that has developed habits which foster and foment anticipatory anxiety; we’re a nation of people who are just waiting for the next crisis or catastrophe to happen and we feed such anticipatory anxiety with “doom scrolling” on our phones, daily drowning ourselves in the negative messages of social and mainstream media, and joining in the discourse of desperation across social media platforms. The result of crafting a lifestyle laden with negative anticipation is the crippling affects of anticipatory anxiety.

Once in the clutches of such anxiety, millions of people don’t know how to handle it. Instead of treating it effectively, they turn to things to lessen the experience of anxiety (e.g., inner turmoil, emotional pain, and physical symptoms) and deaden the emotions (thus, addictions are the third most prominent diagnoses), often turning to negative and ineffective coping mechanisms. Doing what needs to be done at the root level to overcome anxiety then feels like too much work, requiring too much self-discipline, so we seek out simpler ways to just cope.

What is anxiety?
The American Psychological Association describes anxiety as “… an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure.” Key to understanding “anticipatory anxiety” is that such anxiety stems from our own thought life — what we’re thinking or saying to ourselves. In essence, the suffering we incur from anticipatory anxiety is, quite literally, self-induced, it evolves from our own thinking.

You may understand that better by gaining an understanding that our thoughts create our emotions, and the combinations of our thoughts and emotions create our behavior. If we develop a lifestyle, patterns, or the habit of negative anticipation, the only emotions we can experience are parallel to what we’re thinking, what we’re saying to ourselves in our self-talk. Finally, the combination of those thoughts and emotions forge our behavior. Nothing rational and healthy is birthed from negative anticipation, irrational thinking, and the emotions crafted by them.

Anticipation can actually be a tremendously positive and beneficial tool, or the debilitating tool of anxiety. Let me give you examples of both.

On the positive side, several years ago when I lived in Hawaii I led an ordinary, middle-of-the-pack home healthcare and behavioral health organization to become the largest home healthcare agency in the state. A key step in developing the company was teaching some of our employees how to use anticipation to be more productive and even more calm!

When I first arrived at the organization and conducted my initial assessment of our operations, I noticed some of our administrative personnel, especially our customer service representatives, were demonstrating unhealthy levels of anxiety about their jobs. However, looking further into the matter, I discovered they were experiencing stress and anxiety about routine issues that could be anticipated, and therefore planned for. For example, every week our customer service reps would have personnel call out (sick or otherwise unavailable) for an assignment. That wasn’t the issue; the issue was our reps failed to anticipate this weekly occurrence, which meant they failed to plan for it by always having on-call personnel available to fill-in for employees who called out. By applying some rational anticipation to how they executed their work, our team improved operations and experienced a greater calm and enjoyment in doing their jobs.

But anticipation can also be very irrational and disappointing, as demonstrated in this story shared by Joe Bertone:

In 1930, in a small town in Oklahoma one high school seemed to loose all the football games they played against their arch rival from a neighboring school. The more important the game the worse they lost. Finally, a wealthy oil producer decided to take matters in his own hands. He asked to speak to the team in the locker room after yet another devastating defeat. What followed was one of the most fantastic football speeches of all times. This business man proceeded to offer a brand new Ford to every boy on the team and to each coach if they would simply defeat their bitter rivals in the next game. Knute Rockne couldn’t have said it better.

The team went crazy with sheer delight. They howled and cheered and slapped each other on their padded behinds. For seven days, the boys ate, drank and breathed football. At night they dreamed about touchdowns and rumbleseats. The entire school caught the spirit of ecstasy, and a holiday ferver pervaded the campus. Each player could visualize himself behind the wheel of a gorgeous coup, with eight gorgeous girls hanging all over his gorgeous body.

Finally, the big night arrived and the team assembled in the locker room. Excitement was at an unprecedented high. The coach made several inane comments and the boys hurried out to face the enemy. They assembled on the sidelines, put their hands together and shouted a simultaneous “Rah!” Then they ran onto the field and were demolished, 38 to zero.

The team’s exuberance did not translate into a single point on the scoreboard. Seven days of hooray and whoop-de-do simply couldn’t compensate for the players’ lack of discipline and conditioning and practice and study and coaching and drill and experience and character. Such is the nature of emotion [anticipation]. It can lead us not to truth but deceptions.

Getting a grip
Instead of just trying to find a way to cope, or possibly getting lost in addiction to deaden your mind to a compulsion of irrationalities and unregulated emotions, anxiety can be treated with high probabilities of overcoming it.

Some steps in healthy and effective treatment:

– You must deal with your thought life. This will include:

• • Developing a greater level of self-awareness.
  • Intentional self-discipline and self-control.
  • Learning, and applying, cognitive restructuring techniques so you can learn to think more rationally, more consistently.
  • By learning to think more rationally, being enabled to better regulate your emotions.
  • Develop a lifestyle of better stewarding (caring for) your physical body.
  • Learning more effective relational and communication skills.

More than a spiritual component
Recent studies have revealed that only four percent of Americans have a biblical worldview, only six percent of self-identifying Christians have a biblical worldview, and only 37 percent of pastors have a biblical worldview. And while a majority of Americans still claim to be Christian, few actually believe the basic tenets of the Christian faith.

Simply put, for most of us Jesus is not central to or in our thinking at all, and that has its powerfully negative impact. If we use and direct our minds the way scripture instructs us, we won’t be filling our thoughts with negative anticipation or become slaves of anxiety.

However, while the Bible clearly instructs us not to worry or be anxious about anything (Phil. 4:6), we’ve also failed to fully understand what that means. Many Christians take that as just shutting off any rational anticipation or rational anxiety. While God does not want us to worry or be negatively anxious over anything in life, usually that doesn’t become a consistent reality in our lives overnight. Instead it comes by maturing as a disciple of Jesus Christ, fostering our relationship with and reliance on Him, growing in our knowledge, understanding, and application of the Word, increasingly becoming more obedient to God, and incrementally being transformed into the likeness of Jesus.

It does start with becoming more purposeful about how we use anticipation. The Apostle Paul routinely encouraged us to direct our anticipation in worthwhile ways, like directing our thoughts toward Christ and thinking about things of greater value:

“Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory,” Colossians 3:1-4.

Are you one of the millions suffering from anticipatory anxiety? If so, I encourage you to get help if needed so that you don’t live your life as a slave to anxiety. Anticipation can be part of healthy spiritual disciplines that make for a sound mind.

Scotty