Day 175 - Quitting Gambling
How anxiety takes us out of the world and is a precursor to addiction and suicidal thoughts
Day 175 - How anxiety takes us out of the world and is a precursor to addiction and suicidal thoughts
Note: I am not a philosopher, reading Being and Time, learning about phenomenology has been a self help journey, an amazing one, a personal one, and a long one. I don’t claim to know anything about thee topics on a deep level, yet I have put a great deal of time and effort into understanding them and continue to everyday.
In Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time, he speaks largely about Death, about how humans, unique from any other being, are aware and always concerned with their own death. We are Beings-toward our own death. One amazing insight in this philosophical masterpiece is that it is anxiety which brings us closest to an experience of death, an experience of knowing death. He says that when we are anxious, we find ourselves outside of the world, outside of our normal everyday average way of being. When we are anxious, the world stops making sense. Consider a panic attack, when people describe panic attacks they often talk about how immediately they are thrown into a state they are not used to, they can’t make sense of, their body stops acting normally, they stop thinking rationally, and ultimately they describe an immediate sense that they are “going to die”. The panic attack is the most acute and powerful form of anxiety, and what we find is that in this heightened state of pure anxiety, we are immediately consumed with the idea of death.
I find this account and description of anxiety as truly fascinating. I never really thought of anxiety as “being taken out of the world”. Anxiety for me was always a “being concerned with the world”, often to the point of paranoia, fear, and pure avoidance. Yet, when I look back on how anxiety has actually effected my life (not just how it made me feel), I find that what happened in states of anxiety… was absolutely a “being taken out of the world”, where the world here means “the average everydayness of everyday normal life”. Anxiety had me making irrational decisions, being paranoid about non existent things, being fearful for no reason, taking up an inferiority complex, falling into self hatred. Anxiety pushed me away from the real world.
Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, or any other substance or behavior that can cause an addiction present themselves as an alternate world. When anxiety takes me out of world, I find myself lost, I find myself looking for a world to calm my anxiety. I found that gambling was the other world I could step into. Gambling was a world that would embrace me, and because it wasn’t the real world I never found myself in an “anxious” state when gambling, it was the remedy for the anxious state that took me out of the real world. Despite gambling destroying my life, and leading to the anxious state, it was the world I would escape to, feel safe in, and actually desire.
Anxiety allows us to ask the question “What would the world look like without me in it?”. Boom… there is it.. how the simple, everyday feeling that we all have from time to time is so fundamentally linked to us considering our own death. For those who deal with anxiety on a daily basis, this question leads fairly quickly to thoughts of suicide. Even as a child… who dealt with anxiety all the time… I thought about suicide all the time. Not my own suicide, but the act in general, the idea that someone could do it, or could come to the desire for it. I was thinking about suicide from philosophical and psychological perspective when I was 12. My life was fine, but I was always anxious, and I never understood why at that age I was so consumed with death and suicide. Now, it makes perfect sense. Anxiety took me to those thoughts, because that is what anxiety does. Anxiety is me not being myself, me not being present in the real world, thinking about the world “without me”, me falling into the gambling world, me always coming back to gambling, me considering my own suicide. It all makes sense to me now.
Anxiety is not a feeling, but a state of being. A state of being “outside of the world”. It really becomes clear to me how anxiety can push us to addiction, push us to be “people we are not”, and can implant seeds of considering our own death. When this anxious is compounded with behavioral issues or addictions (that destroy our real lives) which make it difficult to pull ourselves out of anxiety it is not shocking that suicidal thoughts or even the act itself are so close. Everyone feels anxious at times, yet when a “normal” person finds themselves falling “outside of the world” they quickly snap back to it, they find their footing. Those that can’t, find themselves searching for a world…which can lead to addiction…or being consumed with their own not existing in the world at all…which can lead to suicidal ideation.
When I look at anxiety in such a clear way, I can start to realize just how and why I became an addict, why I had suicidal thoughts. I can start to understand that anxiety has the potential to completely change by state of being. I can be aware and present when I start to feel anxious and try to pull myself back into the world. I can realize that the stronger the bonds I build in the real world (habits, relationships, commitments, goals) the easier it is for me to snap back to the real world when I am feeling anxious. Indeed, as I am now almost 6 months in, my recovery itself is the foundational thing which pulls me back to the real world when I feel anxious now. Recovery is my rope back to the real world, and I won’t ever let go.