Embodiment Anxiety

The term ‘anxiety’ seems to be a catch-all for any negative emotion not painted as sadness, rage, or straight-up terror. Disentangling the actual feeling of anxiety is complex and requires a dive into the somatic and cognitive experience of what variables are contributing to such a state. At the fundamental level of perception, for anxiety to occur there must be a mismatch between what is expected and what has occurred OR there must be a chance of such a mismatch in the foreseeable future given a certain set of probable circumstances with potential outcomes informed by past experience or priors. Pursuing the origin of these present or potential future mismatches requires acknowledging the role of one’s self in the container of experience as somewhat of a chess piece. The exercise begins by laying out what pieces are doing what in the current game - in the scenario, what role do you play? What role do others play? Are you the player or a chess piece? Oftentimes people will come to realize that they have been pieces in someone else’s game, which leads to feelings of being manipulated and used, but find themselves stuck due to the entanglement of their role in the game being played. More often than not the player is the culture we exist in - the normative values and beliefs held by the masses, influenced by religion, family of origin, governmental pressures, and social constructs. Coming to realize these factors can be jarring, and thus open up greater insecurity, which requires a stable navigator to assist in maintaining the container. But what about that general feeling of unease that carries with it some of the classic signs of anxiety, without any or even a majority of the above?

Embodiment Anxiety

Humanity, and really life in general, has a fundamental orientation to survive. Survival has an inherent need for safety - a principle that has several parts - but one of them is dependent on knowledge of the embodied self. This is internally represented by the accumulation and integration of exteroceptive inputs from the environment, as well as interoceptive inputs from sensory receptors embedded within the body. Such senses are organized in three primary domains: visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive. These signals converge and are interpreted in a way that produces a sense of where the organism is in space, relative to the outside world and to itself. Discrepancies in these signals lead to physiologic uncertainty, with suboptimal reference frames of which to orient properly in the world. This kind of uncertainty yields continuous interference with how to operate in reality as it is presented but it is challenging to subjectively perceive because of the cognitive strategies that are deployed to explain the feelings that manifest as a result of the mismatches. This is what I call embodiment anxiety.

Visual

The majority of our orientation to the world is established through visual input - what is up, down, left, right, etc. in relation to our perceived frame of what we cognate as ‘normal’. These visual cues influence postural muscles in the spine - the suboccipital muscles in the cervical spine primarily - to adjust the position of the head to stabilize on the horizontal plane. Eye movements are also deployed to constantly field incoming stimuli that are of interest and promote movement toward, away, or to stay in order to acquire information and feedback on the generated movements. This leads to internal answers to questions like, ‘am I closer to my current aims or further away?’. While most people don’t have issues with visual integration (aside from retinal and eyeball pathology), there are certainly problems that can manifest if the oculomotor system is inefficient in its precision of the execution phase of eye movement or in the planning phase of such movements. Excessive corrections to eye movements like saccades or pursuits can be very energetically taxing and result in fatigue, both in the extraocular muscles and the neuroanatomical regions that are running the calculations, which can then manifest as brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and even headache. This kind of presentation is seen often with head injuries and metabolic diseases that impact neuronal energy production and waste clearance. Additionally, the conditions of modernity that include chronic digital device use, close proximity of targets of interest (rather than broad environmental screening for what could be considered ‘natural targets of interest’), and the concomitant reduction in the exposure of the visual apparatus to circadian wavelengths of light also impact oculomotor and retinal health, which may translate into greater amounts of prediction error and thus more work to update and correct the visual reality. 

Vestibular

The vestibular system (which includes the cerebellum to a large extent) is more primitive than the visual system, but that does not mean it is less important. While vision may dominate the sense of ‘balance’ and self-orientation, its anatomy and physiology are bootstrapped in utero and throughout early infancy by the vestibulo-cerebellar system. Many are familiar with the sensorimotor homunculus in the cortex proper, but the most fundamental map of the self is actually buried deep in the cerebellum. When it comes to developing a proper sense of the physical self, the integration of signals coming from the inner ear (rotation from the semicircular canals and translational from the otoliths) relative to gravity into the brainstem is paramount as it influences the postural muscles that provide antigravity support, allowing for upright, bipedal movement. Beyond this very physical sense though, is the internal processing and spatial cognitive apparatus that is highly correlated with memory as such - not just spatial. This is evident in individuals who suffer from injuries to the vestibular system, who show major deficits in implicit and explicit memory. Vestibular sense is also associated with serotonergic signaling in the brainstem, which provides a bridge between the sense of self, position in the social hierarchy, and the resultant postural tone. Finally on this topic, though this is not an exhaustive treatise on vestibular involvement, there is the cortical integration of vestibular inputs organized in brain regions that qualify the affective state of the self and modify the ability to executively manipulate such states - pain, sadness, fear, and rage, along with the sociocultural derivations of those primary emotions. All in all, proper vestibular integration is necessary for an internal sense of safety within the body and outside in the world.

Proprioceptive

With the two major contributing systems covered, we are left with proprioception as the last bastion to understand the embodied self. Proprioception is an amalgamation of signals received by receptors in the joints, muscles, tendons, skin, and organs that influence vestibular and visual outputs and converge into cortical regions that generate actual awareness of the body peripherally, rather than isolated around the head and neck. Mechanical manipulation, chemical stimulation, and temperature change in body tissues generate a signal that conveys what has happened locally, and from the locale of interest the signal is sent up through the spinal cord and integrated into the perceived self. In normal development, these signals are meant to provide confirmation to the spatiotemporal model that the visual and vestibular systems have in place and to alert to discrepancies when challenges are experienced from the outside world, thus allowing for the model to respond by reflex, voluntary behavior, or even update if the new information is relevant enough. So how is it that our innate ability to adapt to the outside world in response to touch, movement, and imagination gets so bastardized? To again blame modernity for its shortsightedness isn’t my intention, but it is what it is - from the way we restrict our feet from feeling the earth, the introduction of mega comfortable shoes that glamorize maximum cloudiness, overprotection of children learning how to engage with reality by intervening too much, staring down at a screen, sitting in chairs all day, etc. - all consequences of well-intentioned advances, and at the same time unintentionally stymieing the normal neurodevelopmental process that continues through adult life. The result? Unembodied selves paradoxically yearning for an understanding of the space they occupy. 

Conclusion

The presence of embodiment anxiety, in particular the felt sense of unease that isn’t a consequence of circumstances, life events, fears, or otherwise practical things to be uncertain about, is a very real and present phenomenon in the population. The failure to achieve optimal orientation with respect to gravity and the space we occupy leads to somatic depression, identified in posture and body language, which may manifest indeed into biological depression, panic disorder, lack of confidence, and eventually risky hedonic behaviors or medically directed interventions [SSRI/SNRIs] that biochemically falsely elevate the sense of hierarchical status. all of which can be addressed by an intentional dive into knowing thyself through movement, and working with someone who can assess, identify, and intervene in ways that navigate embodiment and postural restoration through the visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems.