Attention's Role in Anxiety & Depression: From the Look to the Stare

Iain McGilchrist, in "The Matter With Things," posits that "Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us." This highlights that our experienced reality is profoundly shaped by how we direct our attention. Given the complexity of reality and our limited capacity, we can only attend to a fraction of what exists. Changing our attentional capacities or what we focus on fundamentally alters the world we perceive. Neuropsychologists and philosophers widely agree that the type and extent of attention we pay directly influence the nature of our experienced world.

This concept has significant implications: it suggests that each individual can experience many possible worlds. Some of these worlds are conducive to a fulfilling life, while others are not. This article will explore the role of attention in creating the experiential worlds associated with anxiety disorders and depression, offering insights that can aid in overcoming these conditions.

The Role of Attention in Anxiety and Depression

Chronic anxiety and depression stem from a multitude of factors, including biological predispositions, environmental influences, the impact of anxious or depressed parents, or unfortunate life events. Regardless of the initial cause, once these forms of distress take hold, they are perpetuated and exacerbated by a maladaptive way of attending to the world.

To understand this attentional stance, we can use the analogy of "the look" versus "the stare." These two ways of visually attending to the world mirror the difference between a healthy deployment of attention and the pattern that sustains anxiety and depression.

The Look vs. The Stare

Susan Sontag distinguishes between the two: - The Look: Voluntary, mobile, and varies in intensity as its foci of interest are engaged and then exhausted. - The Stare: Compulsive, steady, lacking variation, and fixed.

Psychiatrist Louis Sass further elaborates: - The Look: Closer to the "natural attitude" of everyday life, emanating from a secure base and rooted in the lived body. It travels within a stable horizon, capturing reality conventionally and pragmatically. - The Stare: Rigid and fixed.

The attentional stance of depressed and anxious individuals mirrors the "stare"—it is rigid, fixed, compulsive, and lacks variation.

Rigidity in the Psyche

A healthy mind exhibits variation in thought patterns, shifting focus between positive, negative, and neutral aspects. In contrast, the depressed or anxious mind lacks this variation, becoming rigidly and compulsively attuned to negative thought patterns.

• Anxiety: Characterized by obsession over potential threats and rumination on all that could go wrong.
• Depression: Characterized by "a selective attention to and exaggeration of negative experiences of what is going 'wrong' in one’s life rather than what is going 'right'" (Michael Mahoney, "Self-Change"). This compulsive focus on negativity narrows the experiential world, ignoring the good in life and denying the potential for positive outcomes.

Rigidity in the Body

This maladaptive attentional stance extends beyond the psyche to the body, as Alexander Lowen noted: "Since psyche and soma [body] are like the two sides of a coin, head and tail, what goes on in one realm also occurs in the other."

A healthy individual attends to the world with a graceful and spontaneous body. Depressed and anxious individuals, however, do so rigidly. Physical manifestations include: - Stooped posture - Caved-in chest - Tightened fists - Clenched jaw

These bodily expressions not only reflect the state of the psyche but also intensify feelings of tension, anxiety, sadness, or depression. Alexander Lowen, in "The Spirituality of the Body," explains: "If a person has a strong and secure sense of himself, he will naturally stand erect. If he is frightened, he will tend to cower. If he is sad or depressed, his body will droop. If he is trying to deny or compensate for inner feelings of insecurity, he will stand like a martinet, and his posture will be unnaturally rigid."

Rigidity in Behavior

Beyond rigid thoughts and bodily postures, the behavior of depressed and anxious individuals also becomes rigid. - Why pursue life's challenges if every step is accompanied by catastrophizing thoughts and a body generating tension and anxiety? - Why take risks for a fulfilling life if one believes they are destined to fail?

Depressed and anxious individuals often lack healthy variation in behavior patterns, preferring passivity and avoidance over novelty and confronting challenges.

The Self-Perpetuating Feedback Loop

This rigidity in mind, body, and behavior creates a vicious cycle: 1. Negative thoughts rigidify the body. 2. A rigid body leads to increased negative feelings. 3. These negative feelings act as a barrier to constructive action.

Alternatively: 1. Avoiding normal modes of action promotes negative thought patterns associated with anxiety and depression. 2. These negative thought patterns rigidify the body. 3. These forms of thought and embodiment further undermine healthy modes of action.

As Carl Jung stated in "Theory of Psychoanalysis," "…retreat from life leads to regression, and regression heightens resistance to life."

Breaking the Cycle

Escaping the downward spiral of depression and anxiety requires broadening attentional faculties to counteract the shrinking of our experiential world and the rigidification of our body. The alternative is a stagnant, constricting existence, losing touch with the healthy flow of life. Ludwig Binswanger noted that when an individual's "sense of the flow of life has come to a stop or been frozen… that person can no longer realise himself, no longer mature, and will lose the capacity to make… emotional contact with others."

The challenge lies in how to achieve this broadening when stuck in self-reinforcing patterns of thought, embodiment, and behavior. Iain McGilchrist suggests that "To find the ‘richest’ view [of the world], the one that seems truest to the world as a whole, in the sense that it resonates with our experience in the richest way, the imaginative exercise of inhabiting a number of points of view is required." The next video in this series will explore how to address this crucial question.