Existential anxiety is a result of our own freedom to make choices, our responsibility for ourselves, the inherent meaninglessness of life, and the inevitability of death. Existential dread is another term for this type of anxiety, which differs from what we generally mean in the mental health field when we use the term “anxiety.” It’s the dread we feel when we’re grappling with questions like “Did I do the right thing?” “What’s the point of my life?” “Am I a bad person?” at 1 A.M.
In existential therapy, dread or anxiety inevitably comes with being free to choose our own actions, and therefore responsible for ourselves. The bad news is such angst is unavoidable. The good news is we can use this feeling as a force for healing.
I see a lot of existential anxiety in 40-somethings who are outwardly very successful. They find themselves in therapy feeling dissatisfied and disconnected. They may have chosen a career path their parents wanted, or they were encouraged to take in school because of a certain aptitude, or even just followed the path of least resistance. They’ve attained societal success (status, financial, familial, or other) and know they are “supposed to” be happy.
But they didn’t choose any of this for themselves. They checked all the boxes they were told to check, and they didn’t get the payoff of happiness. These clients show up with agitation or a sort of morose restlessness, needing change but having no idea what’s even possible.
Such suffering highlights the way we can be troubled by our own freedom and need for meaning. Søren Kierkegaard (considered the father of existentialism) called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” Psychic dizziness is, as you can imagine or may have experienced, disorienting and distressing. So of course there’s a strong temptation to avoid this. In some, this might show up in an “it is what it is” kind of attitude—a relinquishment of agency. Others turn to the many available anxiety reduction techniques. In doing so, they all lose the chance to face the important meaning of their anxiety.
To heal, embrace existential anxiety
Such dread or anxiety is not just a burden—it is an opportunity. Turning toward it is a chance to figure out how the choices you make are or are not serving your well-being, what values you are or are not living by. Your dread means you have the freedom to heal your suffering, not just avoid it.
Rollo May, who pioneered existential psychotherapy in the US, wrote that “one would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever … Actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living.”
What a scary idea! But this process of deconstruction and reconstruction helps us heal from the suffering those patterns have caused. It also opens up space for the new by removing the stuff that doesn’t serve us.
Here’s an example. I had a client in his 30s who had spent many years hustling for freelance work. Then he was offered a full-time job with salary and benefits, and felt he “needed” to take it. This job turned into a successful career track.
But he was full of dread about his future. He had cognitive dissonance every day because his profession and his values clashed. He had security, but he felt trapped, drained, and unhappy.
To deal with his situation, he had to confront that he was living according to values not his own. Societal expectations, and his parents’, were motivating factors for staying on his current path. Beyond that, he didn’t think he had the ability to do anything else. His health was changing his priorities, too. He had been telling himself that it was okay to have a job just to make money and find meaning outside of work. But a progressively worse chronic health condition didn’t leave him the capacity for that.
Eventually, he started to consider all work options, revisiting the many ideas and wishes he’d had for himself over the course of his life. He faced the fact that his embodied experience meant he needed to have a different relationship to work. And he challenged the internalized capitalism and ableism that were keeping him stuck in a situation he didn’t want.
With new insights, he was able to transform existential anxiety into courageous excitement. He made some big life changes and now lives a more authentic life with meaning and contentment.
This is how we ultimately heal the existential anxiety within us: use the nervous energy or dread we feel to fuel action instead of letting it freeze us. In doing so, we become agents in our own lives, able to act in the interests of our own well-being.
