How To Cure Night Anxiety
And what we can learn from Black Hawk
A defining ill of the modern world is night anxiety.1
It comes across as an overwhelming sense of fear, doubt about the reality of the threat, and self-doubt about our ability to cope with it.
The face might flush. The eyes might dilate. Maybe the anxious man stares into YouTube. Maybe the anxious woman thumbs her way through Instagram. The voices in the mind that sound as though they are behind a wall grow louder the more they are drowned out. In a moment of courage, the walls are torn down to face the voices, to make out the words, but in a flash the voices turn into black phantoms and fly off into nothingness, leaving behind something even worse: a sense of silent judgment.
It is this judgment that I am in awe of. There is a crucial truth here. We are given a few reasons why anxiety seems to happen at night: lack of sleep, isolation, lack of tasks, minimal sunlight, and so on. But these reach only as deep as the skin and not the soul.
What then? Let us step back in ancestral time with the Sauk war-chief Black Hawk for a counterpoint.
It is the late 1700’s. The sun falls in the West, leaving a thin smear of reddish-orange across the horizon. A dozen Sauk warriors huddle in the ferns of a forest west of Lake Michigan. Black Hawk joined his father on this mission against the Osages tribe in retaliation for their latest attack on the Sauk. Black Hawk tells us, “It was not long before we met the enemy, when a battle immediately ensued. Standing by my father’s side, I saw him kill his antagonist… Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, [and] smote him to the earth with my tomahawk…” When Black Hawk looked at his father, the old warrior “said nothing, but looked pleased.”2
I could feel his passion and sense of purpose through the pages in my hands. In his world — the furnace that shaped us — every man, woman, and child measured their self-worth by how well they could overcome antagonists: claw, cold, mudslide, and tomahawk, but also self-limitations.
There were many grim things about ancestral nights, but anxiety was not one of them. Does this mean that these tribes fighting their forever-wars were frolicking beneath rainbows? No. Knees shook. Hair raised on end. Bladders suddenly needed to empty. But this was less anxiety and more mind-focusing nervousness.
How so? Let us go back to our definition of anxiety. How could Black Hawk feel an overwhelming fear when he had dealt with arrow heads and screams since the moment of his birth? How could he doubt the reality of the man with a tomahawk when that man is right in front him with black coals in his eyes? And how could he doubt his own ability to cope with the enemy when his entire life had been spent preparing for that exact showdown? How, then, could he be anxious?
So what has changed? We are still the same people, so it must be the environment. But an environment can make us do nothing, so it must be how we choose to interact with the environment. Why, then, do we find less anxiety within a Sauk camp beneath the moon than we do across the developed world beneath that very same moon?
Let us rejoin the man in the living room. During the day, he focused on work, the grocery store, and a few chores. But as the sun vanishes, so too does his busyness, and he begins to hear the stirrings from within. The wails. The gnashing of teeth. But what is he anxious about? A warrior painted black and red with a bow and arrow waiting for him at the office? Far from it. Safe in his living room, he is anxious in the absence of real and tangible threats.
What then? He is peering into the Void, what I call the gaping wound left open when ancestral antagonists were abolished, and along with them, our sense of self-worth in preparing for them: in keeping loved ones safe, in trading sweat and lactic acid for venison and berries, in overcoming fear, in proving loyalty at cost of blood, and in earning the respect of elders whose respect was worth earning. The anxious man and woman’s noble heritage predicts an epic threat that the modern world will probably never throw at them and for which they have never prepared for. No wonder they are anxious.
We can look at this from another angle. What is the ultimate expression of anxiety? Suicide. I believe the terrible statistic that veterans are eight times more likely than non-veterans to commit suicide at night leads us to a surprising truth.3 Combatants know preparation. Combatants know ancient antagonists. So if they are prepared, why do they commit suicide?
Many modern combatants have eagerly walked into the past; many have stalked alongside Black Hawk on a night raid, so to speak. It is eerie how easily combatants can glide into the silent symphony of a war-party at night and delight in the balance of an M4 in a fist. But a relevant question must be asked: where do combatants commit suicide? In a firefight? Carrying a wounded teammate? Sitting around a fire laughing like madmen while the enemy watches from cold peaks a hop and a skip away? Not from what I have seen. Most commit suicide alone. Without their teammates. Without the mission. Without the fight.
Some commit suicide due to psychological trauma from combat, to be sure; others due to brain damage from blasts, and we are only now learning how significant this may be; still others for reasons we will never know. For my part, however, I am convinced that the suicide rate is so high for combat veterans not due to what they have done, but to what they are no longer doing. They felt the warmth of the ancestral furnace that shaped us, and decided that without the trials, camaraderie, and self-fulfillment that this ancient world offers, life itself is simply not worth living.
Black Hawk, too, when his way of life ended, mourned till the end of his days like so many who stepped out of the Wild and into the Void. If we threw some liquid crystal displays his way, and he sat inside safe and sound, night after night after night, who would expect him to be a happier man?
The significant point is that the ancient world required preparation for antagonists, but my sense is that it was not meeting antagonists that prevented anxiety — it was the preparation itself. My hunch is that preparation is the cure for night anxiety, just as it has been for many veterans I know.
But prepare for what? Who or what is the ultimate antagonist? A tomahawk? No. The walls closing in? No. An enemy? Not even this. According to Paul Tillich, one of the main causes of anxiety is that every one of us has a question hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles: What have you made of yourself?4
Who, then, must we answer to?
Ourselves.
For the anxious, the problem is no longer, I am terrified of some undefined future threat. The problem articulated more clearly is, Am I being useful? Am I suffering beautifully? Am I obeying nature? Am I living with such intensity of awareness that I will not leave a second of life unlived, unsavored, unloved?
So how do we prepare for this antagonist, the Self-Judge? According to life-hackers everywhere, the solution to night anxiety is to journal and jot down anxious thoughts.5 Madness. This is a Band-Aid for a bullet hole.
My sense is that this crisis is a gift.
It as an opportunity to outdo our ancestors, because while they merely lived in the furnace, we can stoke a furnace within ourselves. If we choose to live so fiercely that we leave nothing behind but a burned out shell of a body when our time has come, and if we prepare and strive to make the world a marginally better place than it was when we found it, then it is not unimaginable that the day of self-judgment may be one of the finest days of our lives despite being the last.
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A google search yields a stunning amount of articles and literature on this topic.
Black Hawk. Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak. Penguin Classics. Translated by Antoine LeClair, edited by J. B. Patterson, Rock Island, 1833. 2008.
Tubbs AS, Fernandez FX, Grandner MA, Perlis ML, Klerman EB. The Mind After Midnight: Nocturnal Wakefulness, Behavioral Dysregulation, and Psychopathology. Front Netw Physiol. 2022;1:830338. doi: 10.3389/fnetp.2021.830338. Epub 2022 Mar 3. PMID: 35538929; PMCID: PMC9083440.
Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952.
I'm biased, but I do think that so many people feel malaise because they have chased after what they thought was the American dream, when they were really just chasing a mirage. When they get there, POOF, it's gone. The real American dream is that we can all self-determine. If you let others set your goals for you, you are bound to be misled.
One of my favorite lines that cuts to the chase: “he is anxious in the absence of real and tangible threats.”
Many poignant questions that I wish people would ask themselves…not to act differently necessarily, but to lead an informed life.