Response to Brendan Tomasi: Anxiety (2/16)

Truly anxiety can make or break a persons life causing him/her to become fully consumed within it or to emerge and become victorious. But when the feeling of anxiety comes to mind, the word has a negative connotation or stigma, which in general makes "anxiety" have a predisposed feeling because with many individuals, many cannot cope with it, and it fully consumes them, making some go psychotic and crazy. However you said that Heidegger stated that "anxiety is useful in that it shocks you out of your life as a man in a crowd (das mann) with the reality that no one is going to die for you so we should focus on the essence of our being, enabling us to live an authentic life". In this situation, I would have to agree with Heidegger because anxiety is useful because it does remind us that we are human beings, thus imperfect and that anxiety is a normal feeling that we all experience in small or large doses. However anxiety can have some negative attributes in some situations. For example focusing on the issue on a minimal level, it is common for college students to have test anxiety or general anxiety when finals come around. The reason why is because in this situation there is a massive amount of stress inflicted upon the individual, and usually one is not accustomed or used to a vast amount of stress. But when we analyze this issue at a more serious level, there are some individuals that cannot function in life because they are anxious at an abnormal level, such in the case of agoraphobic individuals who are extremely scared to leave their own house.

Generally speaking everything in your blog post is 100% accurate. Anxiety is a serious issue because as you stated it can ultimately cripple (psychologically) an individual and also absorb all of their happiness. But personally I believe that anxiety in small doses, such as in when finals come around or even when a person is nervous to take a woman on a first date. Again in small doses we are reminded that we are humans and we also imperfect but that does not mean we are not subjected to pain whether it is physically or emotionally such as in this situation. However when anyone is subjected to anxiety at a high level when medication and advanced psychological therapy are needed, this can devastating.