From Chapter 14 Dealing with Anxiety and Building Self-Esteem
“It is estimated that in the course of a lifetime at least one in four Americans will suffer from a debilitating degree of anxiety or worry severe enough to meet the criteria for the medical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder…but even those who never suffer from a pathological or disabling state of anxiety will, at one time or another, experience excessive levels of worry and anxiety that serve no useful purpose and do nothing but undermine their happiness and interfere with their happiness and interfere with their ability to accomplish their goals.” P. 263
Amen to that
The Dalai Lama’s answers to this.
“If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it.” P. 268 Focus on the solution.
“Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can’t do anything about it anyway.” P. 268
Tall order. Again. How?
“Having proper motivation and honesty are the keys to overcoming those kinds of fears and anxieties.” p. 270
This needs some translating.
What do we often feel anxiety about? Let’s consider a few examples.
- Are my children going to succeed? We often worry about our kids. We want them to succeed. To have a better life even than our own. Here I believe the Dalai Lama would say that to some extent we can influence this outcome but additionally we have to define what we mean by success…given all of this book, we might have to rethink that. Money, great jobs, etc. are all material things which we know don’t necessarily bring happiness so how will we define success? The motivation he mentions is motivation driven by altruism (not greed or material things). Furthermore, there is only so much we can do to influence their success so we have to let the rest go.
- Are my children safe? Same answer as above. Some of you know my youngest son has done some “extreme” rope climbing. It’s scary for a parent. However, I actually developed a strategy to help cope with this anxiety. 1. Know he’s a very technical guy who has done the research and preparation for his climbs. 2. Talk about it after he goes….I don’t always want to know about the trip ahead of time. Since there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s sometimes best not to know about it until he’s home safe.
- Will I have enough money to pay my bills? Most of us can do something about this right?
- Will he still love me if I….(fill in the blank)? This one comes back to the “attachment” issue and is perhaps the most difficult to overcome for some…but I also think this one is sometimes a question of “will I still love myself if I….” and there’s definitely something one can do about that.
- I try, but I can’t help everyone and this fills me with anxiety. Here the Dalai Lama specifically suggests examining your successes and feeling good about those rather than your perceived failures. This leads to the next section of the chapter – self-esteem (which specifically relates to self-expectations).
What’s on your list?
Honesty as an antidote to low self-esteem or inflated self-confidence
The range of self-esteem from low to “over confidence” or arrogance. Self-image. How does one distinguish between arrogance and valid self-confidence? “One could think in terms of the consequences of one’s attitude – conceit and arrogance generally lead to negative consequences whereas a healthy self-confidence leads to more positive consequences.
What is an antidote to pride (conceit)? “One antidote is to reflect upon the diversity of disciplines that you may have no knowledge of…I think honesty and self-confidence are closely linked…the more honest you are, the more open, the less fear you will have, because there’s no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to others…”p 280 Furthermore, when it comes to over-confidence, honesty about one’s true capabilities comes in to play. Those with inflated egos are often no happy or are disappointed when the fail to achieve something that was realistically out of their grasp to begin with.
Fearless and honest self-appraisal can be a powerful weapon against self-doubt and low self-confidence.
Notice that anxiety and self-doubt are closely linked. Self-doubt really seems to be related to thoughts such as “am I good enough” “what if I can’t do such and such” “what if they don’t like me” Which then leads to anxiety. All of these things, according to the Dalai Lama can be resolved by combining the first set of strategies mentioned above (only worry about those things with a solution) as well as combining an honest appraisal of yourself. An honest appraisal does seem to require an acceptance of limitations which can be daunting in itself, but the alternative is having the perspective of “I’m just not good enough” which will then lead to unhappiness. Acceptance and humility are largely at play here.
On the otherhand, what about arrogance. It’s hard for me to see that others recognize their own arrogance. And if they do, it seems rare they want to do anything about it. Yet, there are some who, while going through their own self-exploration, may begin to recognize it in themselves.
I’ve known quite a few arrogent folks. And the predominant factors I’ve observed are that they are arrogent because they feel like they are experts in something or they are super accomplished at something. I loved the Dalai Lama’s anetdote to this. Recognize how much you don’t know. I’d go one step further and say – then try to learn something new and see how hard it is. It’s quite humbling.
It’s important to notice here that the arrogence of others can cause others unhappiness, but the focus in this section is the unhappiness that arrogence causes the arrogent one. Arrogence often leads to unrealistic expectations which then leads to disappointment. Again the solutions is honest self-assessment. Learning humility.
Thanks for reading. Next week I’ll summarize and write some final remarks. Would love to hear from you. Have a happy weekend.