Everyone's a Little Anxious

Understanding the anxiety of the head, heart, and gut centers

Anxiety is a human emotion, and quite often, in the Enneagram world, it’s only ascribed to Sixes and occasionally the mental types overall. While it’s true that the mental types struggle with a particular kind of anxious preoccupation, the content and impetus for their anxiety stem from their need to calculate, postulate, and intellectually position themselves within the world, depending on the primary type fixation.

Biological anxiety, which is the result of the body's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, is an evolutionary coping strategy gone awry that stems from the body’s interpretation of a genuine fear or threat. In the modern world, threats are (quite often) no longer as straightforward as a saber tooth tiger stalking us or a neighboring tribe threatening to burn down our village, resources, and family. As humans evolved in consciousness, the ego followed suit. The modern human ego transfers genuine biological threats into situations and stimuli that mimic or harken to more fundamental threats but don’t necessarily pose an existential crisis. These threats are interpreted through our particular instinctual drives first and foremost, then are fed into our Trifix, wing types, and lines of connection, triggering complex defense responses to ward off the ego’s interpretation of the perceived threat.