ABSTRACT
Anxiety is only an illness if the person imagines that a solvable problem is unsolvable or if they perceive a looming threat to health or wealth where none really exists. In social psychology, cybernetic terms have been used to characterise anxiety. Stress, anxiety and exhaustion result from being sympathetically driven to gain ones favorite pleasures; while simultaneously being inhibited or "braked" by some agency that is "sensitive" to the idea of being punished for appetitive success, that is, getting what one wants. H. Kohut called the general fear disintegration anxiety, or a fear of the mind going to pieces. Most generally, all chronic anxiety disorders involve high approach motives frustrated by strong avoidance motives. The person has a habit of activating anxiety-generating ideas upon sensing any relaxation. It is a perfect zero-sum system. The sympathetic nervous system is more arranged to make simple binary, go, no-go decisions.
