I’ve had a love for spooky things since I was a child. While I didn’t know it at the time, I can pretty much trace my anxiety back to childhood. It wasn’t until recently that I realized this overlap may seem odd. Not everyone who lives with anxiety is drawn to scary things, but a lot of us, even those of us with a diagnosis, share a fascination for the eerie. Here are some reasons to help you solve the mystery of why people who are anxious run toward things spooky.
1. Play
Many Americans associate scary things with Halloween and the spooky season of autumn. Costumes, imagination, and stepping out of daily norms conjure the perfect potion for playfulness. Imaginative play has been linked to mental wellness, and can be a self-care strategy well into adulthood. Immersive play may serve as a distraction from one’s anxious tendency of obsessing about the past or future.
2. Nostalgia
For those who have celebrated Halloween throughout the years, it may evoke nostalgia for simpler times of ease. This may be particularly likely for those who developed anxiety in later years and especially so for those without childhood trauma. Even for those who choose to partake as an adult and did not as a child, this permission to play allows the inner child to explore and for the adult self to reap the benefits.
3. Familiarity
Halloween prompts us to think about our fears. For folks who live with anxiety, they don’t need a day on the calendar for that reflection, their minds are often there.
4.Normalization
On a typical day, people who live with anxiety disorders are artfully balancing their thoughts, aiming to discriminate the fine line between reflection and rumination. In a world that generally sends the message that it is unacceptable to have emotions, much less to explore your deepest fears, people who live with anxiety tend to be isolated with their often obsessive inner dialogue. Yet, on Halloween, all things eerie rise from the darkness and the experience of being frightened is normalized.
Society values conventionality, and there are countless ways in which our bosses, our communities—even our friends and families—can use shame as a way to ensure conformity. I like to think that Halloween is one day a year where we get to let go and celebrate being ourselves.
5.Empowerment
Many who live with an anxiety disorder experience struggles with the unknown. To some degree, Halloween offers a relatively controlled exposure to fear with safety being known. For example, when you choose to watch a scary movie, you expect to be frightened. By viewing the trailer, or sometimes simply hearing the title, you set your expectations of what type of alarm to anticipate, such as a ghost sauntering in the background or a creep peeking into the window flush at the center of the screen. I don’t know about you, but when I walk up to a (decorated) haunted house in the month of October, I expect some ghoulish creature to pop out at me. When it does, there is a sense of relief.
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