Neither Fight Nor Flight

Anxiety is not a disease--but it is just as catching and as hard to cure. When a tense, anxious man tries to hide his feelings, other people "sense" what he is up against and start worrying too. In fact, it may be the tenseness of trying to hide tenseness that infects others, say Drs. Jurgen Ruesch and A. Rodney Prestwood of the University of California Medical School, in the current Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.

A man reacting to danger (real or imagined) may express himself in three ways: anger, anxiety or fear. Anger and fear find outlets in fight and flight, but anxiety is a painful in-between that allows neither fight nor flight. The anxious man suffers poor circulation, especially at the extremities ("cold feet"), his muscles are "all tightened up," his breathing is likely to become fast and shallow.

Some people try to compensate for their anxiety by too much eating, drinking, smoking or sexual promiscuity, say the California researchers. None of these does them any good. Actually, it is hard for overanxious people to win, no matter what they do: those who practice rigid self-control in normal times are likely to break down in a crisis. However, Drs. Ruesch and Prestwood believe that people "who in daily life . . . might miss their streetcars or forget their umbrellas . . . tend to tolerate their anxiety in emergency situations much better," because they have discharged their anxiety little by little.

A clue to an effective treatment for anxiety, say Ruesch and Prestwood, can be found in the nursery. "There is a natural impulse for the normal mother to alleviate the anxiety of the child by picking it up," a method which usually works. Trie doctors do not advocate rocking or dandling grownups, but they insist that an adult's need to share his anxieties, preferably with a loved one, is as great as an infant's. "The successful management of anxiety generated in daily life seems possible only through the process of sharing and communication," the researchers conclude. "[This] is the process which is basic to all interpersonal relations from babyhood to old age . . ."

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