QUESTIONS ON STRESS BREAKDOWN: AM I ASKING MY NERVOUS SYSTEM TO DO SOMETHING WHICH IS TOO DIFFICULT?

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If we ask the nervous system to process conflicting information or to make a decision when it has already been programmed not to, it responds exactly as a computer would in similar circumstances. It responds with an error signal or alarm reaction. Thus an anxiety reaction may occur if we ask the nervous system to deal with inappropriate information.
For example, due to experiences in childhood a boy may have made a decision such as – ‘I will never ask anyone to marry me because I could never face the guilt if I couldn’t live up to the responsibilities of married life and have to leave like my father did!’ Because this vow or promise was made so long ago, and it was in association with painful memories, it was repressed into the unconscious mind, where it was out of reach of conscious recall, and therefore apparently forgotten. Now, many years later, this young man is preparing to ask his girlfriend to marry him, but he finds when he goes to pop the question, he develops anxiety symptoms. However, he is quite unaware of the reasons for this at the time and may even make the incorrect assumption that he doesn’t love the girl enough.
What the young man is doing is attempting to make a decision about marrying this girl while his nervous system is still programmed by the pre-existent decision which is unconscious, but still operative within the nervous system’s memory circuits. The decision-making process becomes blocked or ‘hung-up’, triggering an alarm or anxiety reaction.
In this case, anxiety arising in circumstances where the nervous system is neither apparently overloaded nor malfunctioning could be described as neurotic anxiety. The brain is overloaded in that it is failing to deal with a discrimination task which is too difficult for it to do. The person experiencing such anxiety would experience it in these circumstances whether he or she was otherwise over-stressed or not. However, it is obvious that a number of small, inner, deep conflicts such as the one I described might so use up the available computing space in the nervous system as to allow stress breakdown to occur at lesser levels of load than would happen in a person without such inner conflicts.
Inner conflicts thus lead to inefficiency and a lowered threshold for stress breakdown.
The most common conflicts interfering with our ability to tolerate high levels of stress without breaking down are conflicts over self-protection and self-discipline. Many people, when they experience anxiety symptoms, become anxious about being anxious. ‘How long will I be like this?’, ‘How do I know I’m going to get over this awful feeling of doom?’, ‘Howl do I know I won’t go insane like my great-aunt?’, ‘How can I be sure the doctor will be able to come if I call him?’, and so on. These conflicts can easily lead to a vicious cycle where the person’s focus of anxiety shifts to the question of being anxious. This type of vicious cycle, feeding on itself, is the basis; for phobic anxiety states, such as agoraphobia.

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