How to Resolve Excessive Anxiety

I. Anxiety Is Not That Hard to Resolve
Anxiety is not an especially difficult problem to resolve. I used to fear it too. But in psychology and spiritual practice circles, anxiety is not regarded with so much fear. Countless people have overcome anxiety, including me: over the past several years, I have gone from what I suspected was an anxiety disorder around age 30 to the peace and tranquility I feel today. Zhuangzi’s strength lies precisely in addressing anxiety.
Of course, anxiety is by no means something that can be overcome casually. As with the issues of death anxiety and self-attack discussed earlier, these are issues for the later stages of the process; only when systematic work reaches those stages can an effective qualitative shift occur.

II. Anxiety Seems to Follow Us Like a Shadow
A high school student; a second-year university student in mathematics and physics; a third-year student beginning to prepare for postgraduate entrance exams; a fourth-year student or graduate living at home while preparing for civil service exams. A 25-year-old just entering the workforce; a 28-year-old who has been working for several years; someone around 30; a 35-year-old facing workforce “optimization” and layoffs; a 40-year-old lower-level middle manager; an entrepreneur in their forties; a homemaker; an ordinary person going through a midlife crisis; an ordinary worker who has received abnormal tumor marker results and a diabetes diagnosis; a middle-aged person deeply anxious about their elderly parents and children.
Anxiety seems to follow us like a shadow. It is part of modern life, to the point that people do not consider it “abnormal.” At the same time, they believe anxiety is difficult to resolve, or that it can only be resolved by becoming stronger, more powerful, and wealthier.
Previous article: “Discussing Anxiety-Inducing Work Environments Through My Own Past Suspected Anxiety Disorder,” which explores how anxiety is amplified and pressure intensified at successive levels in the workplace.

III. Understanding Anxiety

1. Anxiety Is “Normal”
   By normal, I do not mean that it should persist over the long term or become excessive. Normal anxiety is part of our normal psychological functioning: a state in which our inner libido is highly activated in response to stress. It is not pathological.
   There is no need to feel ashamed of anxiety. When I worked in financial investment, everyone was anxious, everyone felt ashamed of being anxious, and everyone pretended not to be anxious—which made everyone even more anxious.
   Keep your distance from people who do not allow you to feel anxious. Previous article: “Emotional Stability Is a False Concept: With a Stable Personality, Emotions Flow Naturally”
   Rather than rejecting, fighting, avoiding, or concealing anxiety itself, we need to face it, accept it, and embrace it. Previous article: “How to Embrace Your Dark Side”
   Embrace yourself as you are, anxious in this moment. Embrace your tense inner mind.

1. Distinguishing Normal Anxiety from Excessive Anxiety:
   Normal, reasonable anxiety is part of everyday life. Even the greatest athletes, speakers, and soldiers experience anxiety.
   This article primarily discusses abnormal, excessive anxiety—the kind we can “recognize” as pathological.
   Do surgeons feel anxious when operating? But does that mean they must spend their entire lives in anxiety? Obviously not. On the contrary, doctors need to overcome anxiety; their state should be one of natural ease and composure.

1. Unpacking Anxiety: Excessive Anxiety Is Ultimately an Inner Issue
   From a psychoanalytic perspective, people’s outward pursuit of things often has deeper causes.
   For many small-town exam high achievers, an apparent fixation on grades, fame, and fortune is rooted more deeply in a rescuer personality, conditional love, a linear value system, existential crises, and so on. These issues still need to be addressed at their deeper roots.
   Previous article: “The Small-Town Exam High Achiever Syndrome”
   We often think that what makes us anxious is external: university entrance exams, postgraduate entrance exams, civil service exams, money, relationships.
   But anxiety is ultimately internal: tension, unease, and fixation.
   For example, parents who are anxious about their children’s education and believe their children are headed for disaster are often simply projecting their own inner anxiety and sense of impending disaster onto their children. Children themselves have innate wholeness, an instinct to grow and do good, and the capacity to recover and explore. Yet this parental anxiety ends up suffocating them.
   Our anxiety about our parents’ harmful health habits and their deaths is also often rooted in our own health anxiety.

1. The Direction: Stop Seeking Outward and Look Within
   Anxiety often “focuses” on outward appearances and a loss of control, while inwardly there is confusion and a lack of clarity.
   That is why this classic saying from spiritual practice offers a remedy: “Stop seeking outward and look within.”
   Marx, Buddhism, Zen, and Zhuangzi all guide people to break free of their fixation on outward appearances.
   Return to your original self, to innate wholeness and inherent purity.
   Previous articles: “Zhuangzi: The Ordinary Mind Is the Way” and “Zhuangzi: Benefiting Others Through Stillness”
   The groundedness, sense of presence, conviction, and light that come with living in the present offer a way to counter many delusive thoughts, feelings of emptiness, and anxieties.
   “Be Grateful to Your Past Self, Be Grateful to Your Present Self”

V. Marx + Zhuangzi + Psychology
Anxiety involves many issues, such as:
In terms of methods and frameworks, it ultimately comes down to:

1. Core issues: Kohut’s self psychology; weakness of the self, a harsh superego, self-attack, omnipotent narcissism, a false self, conditional self-confidence, a need for control, and so on.
2. Relationship issues: Winnicott’s object relations school and Adlerian psychology; conditional love, issues of differentiation, karmic entanglements in relationships, repetition of toxic relationship patterns, attachment issues, and so on.
3. Existentialism: Irvin Yalom; loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom and responsibility, death, and so on.
4. Humanistic psychology: Fromm, Rogers, and others; alienation, innate wholeness, and so on.
5. Zhuangzi: issues of survival and money.
6. Marxism: alienation, worldview, outlook on life, and values.
   As discussed in previous articles such as “How to Resolve a Midlife Crisis,” “How to Resolve Year-End Anxiety,” “How to Embrace Your Dark Side,” and “How to Address a Harsh Superego and Self-Attack,” a series of issues ultimately needs to be addressed from the bottom up. Relatively speaking, anxiety is an issue for the middle to later stages; it does not even count as a late-stage issue.