Anxiety blinds us to possibilities

Choi Hoon

The author is a professor of psychology at Hallym University.

I was watching the new volleyball reality show “Rookie Coach Kim Yeon-koung 2.” The much-anticipated first match was not going as expected. The players grew flustered, and the coach shouted instructions. Yet nobody responded. Even when she called their names, they did not turn around. They seemed neither defiant nor deliberately dismissive. It was as if they could not hear her. Perhaps their attention was consumed by the disappointing match and the mounting mistakes made by themselves and their teammates.

Our eyes and ears are open to the world, but not everything we encounter is properly processed. Because our cognitive capacity is limited, we selectively focus our attention. Information we prioritize is processed faster and more accurately, while information we overlook may escape our notice even when it is directly before us.

Anxiety makes matters more complicated. In one experiment, participants were asked to spot lights around them while moving along a climbing route at low and high elevations. At greater heights, their anxiety increased and they became less successful at detecting the lights. Anxiety had effectively narrowed their awareness.

When anxiety intensifies, attention is particularly likely to gravitate toward signs of danger or threat. This response helps us recognize risks quickly and prepare for them. But when threatening information monopolizes our attention, even minor signals can seem dangerous, and we may anticipate failure before it happens. For the anxious volleyball players, repeated mistakes may have begun to look like signs of inevitable defeat, draining their motivation.

Could the same thing happen to us outside the sports arena? When worries about making ends meet and uncertainty about the future overwhelm us, the world can seem like a place with no way out. Perhaps anxiety compounds our real difficulties until we can no longer recognize the possibility of overcoming them.

Just as a timeout briefly interrupts the momentum of a volleyball match, we need moments to calm ourselves and look around. We need a little breathing room to ask whether someone might support us, whether help is available or whether there is another approach we have yet to try, even in the midst of our everyday struggles.

Once possibilities obscured by anxiety come back into view, I believe we can find the strength to take the next step. Sometimes the way forward begins not with an immediate solution, but with enough calm to notice what we had previously missed.