Motivation and Morality: Exploring the Benefits of Practical Anxiety

INTRODUCTION

Often perceived as a purely negative emotion, anxiety is a fundamental and important part of the human experience. While chronic or excessive anxiety can be debilitating, moderate and context-appropriate anxiety plays a crucial role in driving motivation and even indicating healthy morality.

Anxiety brings an important sensitivity to aspects of your life that need your attention. In excess, this experience can certainly lose its value, but it’s important to understand and fully embrace the value of practical amounts of anxiety precisely because of the discomfort it brings. It is not something to be eliminated, nor something to be tolerated for no reason, but to be carried willingly as a key component of pursuing a good life.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Anxiety can easily go awry, but reframing your relationship with it can help embrace its value.
Anxiety signals respect for the weight of your decisions and helps in choosing what is good and right.
Anxiety can be valuable for its own sake as a sign of healthy moral concern.

GETTING STARTED

Personal Growth Through Anxiety

When we object that anxiety is not “good,” we usually mean it doesn’t feel good. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t acting for the good within us.

We might also mean that we don’t do good things because of the anxiety, like ruminating, worrying, and avoiding things that shouldn’t be avoided. But this also doesn’t mean that the anxiety itself isn’t good, just that the situation has gotten beyond our current capacity to tolerate and cope.

Your nervous system has the capacity to experience anxiety for a reason, so it’s important to consider what it’s trying to do for you. It brings an important sensitivity to things that need your attention, such as addressing relationships issues, working on building healthier boundaries, and addressing other uncertainties to prevent the future from getting out of hand.

It’s not an enemy to be defeated, but an aid in assessing risky situations, contemplating potential futures, and weighing the consequences of our actions. We simply cannot do without this discomfort and should welcome it - not to be overwhelmed by it, but to use it for the instrumental value it brings in structuring a healthy life.

The “Essence of Anxiety” - Freedom and Responsibility

The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote about what he called the “essence of anxiety.” This is a combination of our personal freedom to explore and choose any number of different paths to take and the responsibility to choose what is good, moral, ethical, and healthy.

The freedom is “dizzying,” as Kierkegaard puts it, and the responsibility immense, so many people avoid this responsibility altogether and don’t take up the necessary tasks of life. Carl Jung also wrote extensively about this as a major constraint to personal reflection - We are anxious about what we may discover about ourselves that we would then have the responsibility to address. The anxiety remains, but we are trapped in thinking it can be avoided.

Doing the right thing and facing this responsibility means that anxiety is an important aspect of self-development.

It lets you know that you are engaging with your conscience in order to pursue what’s healthy and good in your family life, friendships, intimate relationships, societal expectations, work obligations, and so on.

By understanding anxiety as this complex interplay between freedom of choice and responsibility for action, we better appreciate our capacity for personal agency and the need to find ways to tolerate this uncomfortable energy. We need not avoid anxiety altogether, but rather appreciate all that it offers us.

MOTIVATION

Anxiety as a Means to Greater Things

Anxiety offers significant instrumental value as a means to greater things. This comes primarily as a motivating force for risk management and avoiding bad things, as well as and pursuing good things such as achievement and greater performance.

Risk Management

When it comes to managing risk, less anxiety isn’t necessarily better than more. If you have a chaotic home life, live in a dangerous area, or deal with high stakes situations at work, anxiety is exactly what you need in order to protect yourself. You won’t feel comfortable, but it helps you navigate the risks currently active in your life.

With an optimal level of anxiety, you’re less likely to act impulsively because of the appropriate attunement to threat, you’re less likely to be careless in your decisions, and you’re prepared to navigate ongoing ambiguity.

Too much of anything, of course, can have undesirable effects and the nervous system has its limits before shutting things down. But this speaks more to the threshold of the body for carrying the anxiety well than it does the anxiety itself.

It’s also important to acknowledge that your anxiety may indicate a problem with your environment more than a problem with your ability to cope with it.

For example, many people stay in jobs or relationships too long that are bad for them and make it a personal problem that they can’t “make it work.” Toxic and abusive environments are structured in such a way as to continue activating this anxiety through no fault of your own. The anxiety is needing you to get out, not to change yourself so that abuse doesn’t bother you anymore.

Achievement and Performance

When it comes to pursuing things that are good, you’d never achieve any of your goals without some level of anxious motivation.

That energy is what you need in order to put in the effort necessary to succeed, not to mention for just staying awake and generally alert throughout the day! If you’re not anxious about an upcoming exam, you won’t study. If you’re not anxious about a presentation, you won’t prepare for it. If you’re not anxious to some degree about reaching your goals, you’ll have no competitive edge for improvement.

It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s the stuff that moves you toward what you want and away from what you don’t want in your life. It’s the willingness to grapple with this energy, understand what it wants for you, and figure out what’s needed in response that brings empowerment, satisfaction, and accomplishment. This is also why it’s important to set small, manageable goals so that we’re not overwhelmed beyond our current abilities.

ETHICS AND MORALITY

Anxiety as a Moral Compass

Outside of its role as a motivator for action, anxiety is involved in issues of ethics and morality. When it’s managed and handled well, it assists decision making in ambiguous situations and even demonstrates important qualities of your character.

Ethical Decision-Making

When you’re faced with moral dilemmas, anxiety can serve as a warning sign that something isn’t quite right. This feeling of discomfort can prompt you to take a closer look at the situation and consider the potential consequences of your actions.

Conversely, a study in 2015 yielded results that anxiety can lead to more unethical behavior as we act in self-serving ways to minimize the potential for risk (Kouchaki, M., & Desai, S. D.). This, however, should not be seen as a problem of anxiety itself but of either an unwillingness to have the discomfort or an inability of the body to contain it well. This inability to contain it is what we would call being outside of your nervous system’s “window of tolerance” for uncomfortable sensations. The good news is that this window of tolerance can be expanded in order to better carry this discomfort with less risk of negative effects on our wellbeing.

For example, if you are considering lying to a friend in order to spare their feelings, your anxiety may alert you to the fact that this is not the right course of action. You may feel a sense of guilt or unease at the thought of deceiving someone you care about. By paying attention to these feelings, you can make a more ethical decision that aligns with your values and beliefs. This is the responsibility that Kierkegaard emphasized as part of the essence of anxiety that all people need to contend with in order to live a good life.

Healthy Moral Concern

The final point I’ll make on the value of anxiety pertains to its intrinsic value. This means that it’s good for its own sake and not as a means for anything else. The author Charlie Kurth writes in his book, “The Anxious Mind,” how lingering feelings of anxiety can still reflect well on you even in situations where it’s unfitting and devoid of any instrumental value.

To demonstrate this, he poses the following hypothetical dilemma:

You’re caring for your mother who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. You promised that when the time came, you would give her a euthanizing dose of morphine and now you need to decide whether to keep your promise. As her disease has now run it’s course, you are anxious in considering whether it’s the right thing to do, reflecting both on your promise and on your mother’s condition. After much consideration you decide to keep your promise, and you do. But days later you find yourself rethinking the situation and are still anxious despite coming to the same conclusion that it was the right thing to do. What can we say about this anxiety now that it no longer possesses any instrumental value for this difficult decision now that it’s been made? Ruminating on it will change nothing and serves no purpose.

The point here is that whatever anxiety remains is the manifestation of your admirable sensitivity to the difficult, morally ambiguous choice you faced - a sign that you take your agency seriously and appreciate the weight of your decisions. In other words, well-regulated anxiety can simply be a demonstration of healthy moral concern and a virtue of good character in itself, even when it is no longer helpful.

Conclusion

For all of these reasons, we should not be too quick to eliminate or avoid anxiety in the pursuit of comfort. While anxiety can certainly become disordered and require special intervention, there can be hidden costs in turning away from the instrumental and intrinsic values that practical levels of anxiety bring. A balanced and healthy life, therefore, is one that requires taking the anxieties within it seriously.

SOURCES

Kierkegaard, S., & Hannay, A. (2015). The concept of anxiety. W W Norton & Co Ltd.

Kouchaki, M., & Desai, S. D. (2015). Anxious, threatened, and also unethical: how anxiety makes individuals feel threatened and commit unethical acts. The Journal of applied psychology, 100(2), 360–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037796

Kurth, C. (2018). The anxious mind: An investigation into the varieties and virtues of anxiety. The Mit Press.