There are those who believe that it’s enough to identify the general emotion of anxiety and leave it at that. The problem with that generalist approach, however, is that it either assumes that all anxieties are the same or doesn’t care about the differences between them.
The people who themselves have the different feelings that might all be assigned the general label of anxiety care about the details. They’ve got to live through them. They know that it feels quite different to be chronically worried about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy than it is to feel nervous about having to give a speech before a large audience.
Besides, anxiety is a word born out of the proto-IndoEuropean word angh, a feeling of emotional constriction. Having the nerves before an important social performance doesn’t feel constricting. It makes a person feel fluttery and weak on the inside, like having butterflies in one’s stomach.
To have butterflies in the stomach is the specific emotion of feeling worked up in a disconcerting combination of eagerness and aversion, anticipation and doom, in moments immediately preceding an important performance in front of other people. People with this feeling may be weak in the knees, or feel strangely disconnected with what’s happening around them, even as they are about to be the center of attention. Oddly, they both want to be the center of attention in order to receive the approval of others, and to avoid others’ attention out of fear of failure.
The British have another term for this emotion, derived from the physical manifestation of disturbances in the gut that sometimes accompanies butterflies in the stomach. They call it the collywobbles.
Another term for this feeling is stage fright, but it isn’t really a fear in the sense of wanting to avoid something. Stage fright, collywobbles, and butterflies in the stomach come from the sense of a mismatch from what we want to be in the eyes of others, and our dread of the inadequacy of what we actually are, about to be exposed in public where everyone can see it.
