Anxiety Is a Hunger for Certainty — and So Is the Reach for Food

There is a way of understanding anxiety I have come to trust more than any other, and it sounds, at first, like it has the problem backwards.

Anxiety is, in large part, a hunger for certainty.

Not a lack of certainty — a hunger for it. Most of us believe, somewhere underneath, that if we could just know — how the diagnosis turns out, whether the money holds, what the phone call will say — then we could finally rest. So we reach for certainty. Relentlessly. We treat it as the thing that will, at last, turn the volume down. Hold that word — hunger — because by the end of this it is going to matter.

And here is the part that takes a moment to metabolize, because it runs against everything the reaching mind believes: the harder you reach for certainty, the more anxious you become. The reaching is not the cure for the anxiety. The reaching is the anxiety. A mind that has decided it cannot rest until it knows for sure has signed a contract it can never fulfill — because the future, by its nature, does not hand out certainty. So the mind keeps paying, and never receives the thing it is paying for.

The writer Rebecca Solnit, in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, names something about this I have not been able to stop thinking about. She observes that worry is a way of pretending we have knowledge or control over things we do not — and that what surprises her, even in herself, is how readily we prefer a grim, ugly imagined scenario to the pure unknown.

Sit with that, because it explains a behavior you have almost certainly performed this week. When the future is uncertain, the anxious mind does not sit quietly in the not-knowing. It builds a disaster. It rehearses the worst version — the bad news, the loss, the empty bank account — in detail, on a loop. And it does this because the disaster, however terrible, is at least a known shape. A grim certainty feels more bearable than an open question. The mind would rather hold something heavy than hold something it cannot see the edges of.

Where the responsible adult crosses the line

I want to be careful here, because there is a wrong version of this idea, and you will catch it instantly if I let it slip past.

The wrong version says: stop thinking about the future. That is not true, and you know it is not true, because you have lived a responsible adult life. The responsible adult does look ahead. She thinks about her aging mother, so she can build a plan. She imagines how the surgery could go, so she can ask the right questions. This is not anxiety. This is competence. This is love, expressed as preparation.

So the line is not between thinking about the future and not thinking about it. The line is between two different things the mind can do with an uncertain future — and they look similar from the outside and feel completely different from the inside.

The first is preparation. It has a shape, and it has an end. You name the thing you are afraid of. You decide what you would actually do if it happened. You take whatever action is available today. And then the thought is complete, and you set it down — not because the future became certain, but because you have done the part that was yours.

The second is rumination. It has no shape and no end. It circles. It returns to the same fear, builds the same disaster, and arrives — every time — at no decision, no action, no floor. It does not stop, because it is not actually trying to solve anything. It is trying to feel certain. And that feeling never comes.

Here is the test: when you notice your mind working the future, ask — has this thought reached a decision, or is it circling? If you have named a fear, identified what you would do, and taken or scheduled the action available, that thought is complete. You are allowed to set it down. If you have been around the same ground three times and produced nothing but a more vivid disaster — that is the moment it stopped being preparation and became wallowing. And wallowing is not extra-careful preparation. It is a separate activity that produces nothing but cortisol.

✦   ✦   ✦

And then there is food

If you have read this far thinking this is an anxiety post, here is the turn.

Food is certainty.

In a life full of open questions — and the anxious life is nothing but open questions — food is one of the few things that does exactly what it says it will do. The cookie will taste the way the cookie tastes. The warmth arrives on schedule. These are guaranteed outcomes in a day that has offered your nervous system almost nothing guaranteed.

Here is why I asked you to hold the word hunger. The mind that builds the disaster and the hand that opens the pantry are not two problems. They are one hunger, speaking two languages. Both are a nervous system that cannot tolerate not-knowing, reaching for the nearest available certainty. Neither is a flaw. Both are an intelligent system trying to manufacture solid ground.

You were never broken. You were a nervous system looking for somewhere steady to stand.

With love and light,

Sonja