Complexity and the Problem of Anxiety

In the third season episode “Earshot” of the iconic show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the hero gains the ability to read minds. More accurately, she has it imposed upon her and rather than selectively reading minds, she is forced to constantly hear everyone’s thoughts. What at first seems like an amazing superpower soon overwhelms her. She can’t shut it off. She can’t focus on what she needs to focus on because she’s suffering a constant barrage of noise. She is soon overcome with dread and then eventually panic-inducing terror that cripples her in spite of her reliable history of heroism. It eventually leaves her nearly catatonic. This is a remarkably accurate illustration of the experience and underlying cognitive processes of anxiety.

Anxiety is the most common psychological problem in the U.S., affecting approximately 20% of the adult population, or 40 million people. A sentence like that is usually followed by pointing out that only a third get medical treatment but never is there any serious discussion of what anxiety actually is, or more precisely, what the meaning of anxiety is.

Anxiety is generally experienced as a persistent and excessive feeling of dread or unease, often accompanied by physiological indicators of tensions, such as a rapid heartbeat, sweating, and so on. It is commonly understood as your body’s way of expressing that there’s danger ahead. For many though, anxiety emerges in situations where there’s no life-threatening danger and sometimes no notable danger at all. Is this a chemical misfiring? A psychological disorder? A mental illness? “Neurodivergence?” What is happening and what does it mean?

In order to answer this, we need to take a detour. Anxiety is a specialized emotion, but what are our emotions and what are they for? A complete understanding of our emotional systems elude us but we can reliably explain one critical aspect: Emotions direct your attention and function as cognitive heuristics. In short, your emotions serve to help you managed complexity.

It has been well-established since the 1980s (Libet) that decision making starts, and is sometimes finished, well before your conscious awareness of it. This discovery is often used to question the concept of free will but this is more ideologically motivated than scientifically. Worse, it obscures a vastly more useful insight about how your mind works. Does your subconscious make decisions such that your conscious awareness is merely cosmetic? Why would such an unnecessary illusion evolve? Well of course it isn’t and wouldn’t.

What is happening is that your brain is solving a problem of complexity by reduction. In fact, much of your biology works to resolve this problem. Consider hearing. Imagine that you had super hearing such that you could hear people talking miles away. The noise would be deafening. You’d struggle to hear anyone in particular and there would never be silence but instead only a punishing and relentless cacophony. The amount of noise wouldn’t have changed but your experience of it would be so intense that it’d likely drive you to despair. It’d certainly make trying to function in the world nearly impossible. Thankfully, you don’t hear everything. You hear only what’s most useful. The same is true of your eyes. You can’t see at the atoms or infrared but if you could, it’d be blinding and chaotic. You’d struggle to differentiate oxygen from concrete or a moving car (a critical distinction for survival). Again, you don’t see the totality of existence. You don’t see everything but only what’s most useful to you.

Your sensory systems function to increase the information that you receive. Without eyes, you would have no visual information. Your eyes also reduce that information as well, and that’s the key. A critical function of your sensory systems is to reduce complexity to something manageable and useful.

Your brain is bifurcated, both in hemispheres and into a conscious and subconscious function. Most of your sensory inputs are processed by your subconscious. It then reduces that information into a compressed form akin to a zip file. This compressed “file” is an emotion and it is a critical tool in decision making.

There exists a rare type of brain damage in which the person is unable to generate emotions. In general, they function fine, except when it comes to making decisions. One measure of testing this is to give them a questionnaire along with a red and blue pen. Then they measure how long it takes for them to decide on which color of pen to use. The average person makes that decision nearly instantly but these patients, lacking the assistance of an emotion, can take upwards of fifteen minutes to decide. All of the information that’s reduced and packaged into an emotion helps with decision-making. Without that, a person has to logically (or at least consciously rationalize) their way through the decision. What takes fifteen minutes to work through consciously is handled in seconds processed subconsciously. Your emotions are the tool that your brains uses to send this reduced file from your subconscious to your conscious mind.

Emotions which direct your attention and give a simplified assessment of the situation, often with a set of behavioral options to choose from. Fear is an excellent example. If someone tries to force their way into your home, you will immediately be struck by fear, which indicates that the banging on your door is what you should be paying attention to and it sorts your memory for relevant information, such as where your weapons are or to call 911, and so on.

Anxiety is a specialized emotion that indicates that your subconscious cannot simplify the information into anything useful. Thus it panics. That feeling of dread and danger is the result of your brain’s default. It is more important to avoid danger than it is to find something good. Thus, when your brain doesn’t understand, it defaults to danger. That’s what anxiety is: a scream from your subconscious declaring that it’s dealing with too much complexity. It’s saying “I don’t understand. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what to do. Anything could happen so be alert.”

The simplest way to manage anxiety is through simplification. That’s what routines do. Consider someone like Steve Jobs and his famous mock turtleneck that he always wore. It’s unlikely that he simply had no regard for aesthetics. Rather, a man in his position has so much on his mind that even seemingly simple decisions (like picking between different colored pens, or shirts in this case) can be stressful. Thus, eliminating that choice by wearing the same thing helps reduce complexity in his life.

These kinds of complexity-reduction techniques are everywhere. That’s what social norms are. Gender roles. Traditions. Just as with our bodies, our entire culture functions as a tool to reduce complexity in order to maximize our survival and success.

A classic example of reducing complexity comes from an old dating ritual: buying a woman a drink. Approaching a stranger is fraught with potential complications and pitfalls. If you’re a man, you might come off as threatening or even creepy. Thus, a solution was found in a ritualized pattern of behavior. The man would approach the bartender, someone that everyone is comfortable engaging with socially, and ask to buy a woman a drink. The bartender will approach the woman and explains the offer. She can evaluate the man from a safe distance and if she declines, the situation is over with minimal embarrassment and no conflict. If she says “yes,” then she has communicated that the man can approach and speak with her for as long as it takes for her to finish the drink. If the man is off-putting, she might drink it in one gulp and it is made clear that she isn’t interested. If she sips it then he knows he’s reasonably appealing. The rules are such that she must act in good faith and not take advantage of the situation and he must accept her judgment without complaint. If either violates the rules, there are social consequences (and potentially violent ones for the man). Thus, a very fraught and complicated social interaction (romantic engagement with a stranger) is reduced to a clearly navigated ritual.

That example is anachronistic today. Without it though, these kinds of stranger interactions are much more complicated and fraught with peril. This is evidenced by the sizable market of “pick-up artists” who teach skills to navigate this situation, albeit to vulgar ends. The complexity increases the fail rate which in turn increase conflict and embarrassment, which heightens associated anxiety.

Modern society is astonishingly complex. Social roles are increasingly diverse. Opportunities are plentiful. The freedom of choice is also torturous. This is why it’s so difficult to pick a show to watch on Netflix or food to eat. Endless choices increases complexity. But modern life is also primarily urban. There are seemingly endless strangers, each representing unbound complexity (you have a limited idea as to how they’ll behave). There’s constant noise and a plethora of choices in everything from restaurants to hobbies to dating opportunities to college majors and career choice. All of these compound anxiety. Persistent anxiety is a consequence of the complexity of modern existence.

So now what? Should we just start putting everyone on anti-anxiety meds and give up on this problem? That is the current approach but largely because we haven’t named the problem yet. Once we name it properly then we can start to do something about it. It’s a problem of complexity. Consider gender roles… this is a domain (recall the Heroic Feminine) where artists need to consider creating new gender roles but not ideological constructs but true abstractions from observed reality. A successful presentation of a viable pattern of behavior can help reduced complexity for millions or even billions. We need to start contending with complexity in our education, with sexuality, and in our social expectations. Consider schooling where there were once college-tracks and similar. These funneling structures could be “oppressive” but they also reduce complexity. We need to restore them… but we need to update them as well.

The current cultural fight has a lot to do with a battle between people who want to draw lines and roles and boundaries and those that want to tear them down. This is a destructive dynamic. What’s needed are clearly articulated roles, boundaries, rules, but with simultaneous flexibility and adaptability. We need to balance rigidity and fluidity properly. This is the dynamic that our society needs to try and develop in order to manage the problem of complexity. Until we properly frame the problem, we’ll make no progress. This is my effort to frame the problem correctly. Fingers crossed.