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You feel fine one day. And wake up sick the next day. Our health care language characterizes this as some kind of binary. Anankelogy recognizes five significant stages between full wellness and full sickness.
Which do you think is more likely?
You are either well or sick with little room in between.
OR
Wellness is a matter of degree between full wellness and full illness.
Anankelogy illuminates how every need exists as an objective fact. Wellness only occurs when all of your needs adequately resolve. The less your needs resolve, the less well you become as you slip further down into lower levels of functioning. Lowered functioning then prompts pain, to warn us of this declining wellness.
Anankelogy recognizes how we call experience a functionality array where we go through phases of complete wellness to deadly pathology.
Peakfunctionality - prioritizing resolving needs; full wellness.
Symfunctionality - prioritizing easing needs; from wellness to illness.
Dysfunctionality - prioritizing relieving pain; full illness.
Misfunctionality - prioritizing survival; terminal illness.
peakfunctionality | symfunctionality |
dysfunctionality | misfunctionality |
Conventional thinking presents a wellness/illness binary. Anankelogy suggests something exists in between. Think of complete wellness as peakfunctionality. And illness as slipping into dysfunctionality, and into misfunctionality for terminal diseases and disorders.
In between exists what anankelogy labels as symfunction. Where you are neither fully well nor fully ill. Symfunction can be broken down into smaller steps that helps to explain this slide into illness, called symfunction capture. It includes three distinct stages.
Symfunction creep. Threshold into unwellness.
Symfunction strain. Emerging unwellness.
Symfunction trap. Unwellness taking hold.
Symfunctional strain refers to the ongoing emotional stress you naturally experience from each need not fully resolved. Each imperfectly resolved need prompts your body (specifically, your autonomic nervous system, or ANS) to warn you of its particular threat against your ability to fully function.
If enjoying a quick meal of processed foods leaves you nutritionally deficient, your body warns you that your hunger has not been fully satisfied. If sharing your emotional troubles with a trusted friend who then dismisses your complaint, your body warns you that your need for social support remains unfulfilled. If your job provides a steady income but less meaning to create appreciated value for others, your body warns there is still room for improvement to address your need earn a living creating something meaningful.
Typically, you feel each warning of a partially eased need as a dull and manageable pain. If experiencing just a handful of such needs that remain partially resolved, you likely do not even notice this strain. With most other needs fully resolved, you can still function quite well with little if any distraction.
You can focus sufficiently despite that emerging reminder to satisfy that hunger. Or that slightly disturbing cue to find someone who cares about your complaint. Or that gnawing but easily ignored feeling that you are not really being valued at work for all you’re worth. These mostly resolved needs let you focus on the positives and disregard such miniscule negatives.
Often, however, a few partially resolved needs swells into a molehill of unresolved needs. A few mostly resolved needs slips into mostly unresolved needs, severely compromising your ability to function. These can build up into a mountain of warnings constantly reminding you of growing threats to your ability to function. Any dull pain you felt at the beginning can now overwhelm your attention.
Your growing hunger pangs refuse to be ignored. Your increasing sense of being misunderstood crowds your attention. Your alarming dissatisfaction with your lousy job consumes your focus.
These less resolved needs increasingly distract you, as they scream for your attention. They warn your ability to function is becoming intolerable. Your once-trivial problems now appear more urgent. You feeling increasingly trapped to prioritize these alarming needs.
While not completely nourished, you lack sufficient energy to always prepare a healthy meal. While wondering if you’ll find anyone who’ll care, you adjust your expectations to avoid painful disappointment. While feeling stuck in your dead-end job, you doubt if you can find any job that’s better.
You now feel trapped into this mediocre level of functioning. At least you can get by in this modern world of technological conveniences and predictability provided by enforced laws. At least you’re not alone in this situation.
The “sym” prefix, means “with others”. Sym+function means “relying impersonally on others to adequately function”. The less you can fully resolve your own needs, the more you likely fall back on what others provide. And you tend to accept the imperfect terms for how they provide it.
The less you can fully access water freely from digging your own well, for example, the more you impersonally rely on the public water systems or store-bought water. The less you can count on your friends to help get you through a crisis, the more you seek whatever support is available—even if of lower quality.
The creeping normality of settling for whatever you can get eventually takes its toll. The less you can fully resolve needs on your own or with a few supportive others, the more you tend to rely upon impersonal norms to fill the gap. You now must expect others to respect your exposed needs by following established laws.
You cannot directly know what’s in that store-bought bottle of water, but experience indicates the laws work to keep you safe from any toxins. You cannot directly know if who you call on that helpline will be adequately sympathetic, but experience teaches you they follow ethical standards enough to be worth the call.
Our recent ancestors could provide much more for themselves. Their needs tended to be far less vulnerable to divisive social norms, or to those in positions of power, or to onerous social structures.
You cannot draw clean water from a river as could your great-great-great-great grandparents. Unlike them, you have to apply for a government permit to dig a well. By contrast, you must obey far more comprehensive laws.
Norms rule our lives like never before. We are “free” to obey more laws than ever before in human memory. We are “free” to believe we’re free, or risk being locked up with the largest incarceration population in recorded history. We are “free” to think we’re all okay while living at a time of unprecedented rates of addiction, severe anxiety, major depression, and suicide.
Perhaps you follow the privileged norm of feeling outraged toward others with a different political view. Maybe you’re among those who believe our adversarial legal system works great, that it’s the best in the world. Perchance you accept the dominant narrative that personal problems stem mainly from distorted thinking and has little to do with encroaching limits on your options to stay well.
If you’re conservative and think such symfunctional conformity is more of a problem on the political left, think again. Certain aspects of political generalizing can leave liberals and progressives more prone to symfunctional strain. But even contemporary libertarians fall trap to symfunctional norms. We all rely more on institutions to ease our public needs.
Psychiatry, and almost all of Western medicine, posits wellness or illness squarely within the individual. Its disease model tends to overlook the full context of wellness in favor of hyper-individualism. If you're cooperating with others, then all should go well. Until it doesn't.
Relying on law-based institutions, such as politics and the judiciary, does little to accountably identify and address need to produce wellness outcomes. These institutions easily pull you into what anankelogy identifies as toxic legalism. Trusting laws to ease your needs tends to pull you into unhealthy norms.
But the more you conform to unhealthy norms, like opposing what others inflexibly need, the less you can fully resolve your own needs. Sure, you fit in enough to gain approval. But at what cost to your wellbeing?
If you cannot fully fit in to win their affirmation, then there is supposedly something wrong with you. In a world filled with many socially privileged problems—like hyper-rationalism, outrage porn and hyper-individualism—fitting in can be painfully overrated.
Indeed, much of the stigma around mental illness, as a medical construct, points to this overemphasis upon the individual unable to fully function. It's often easier to talk about a sick person than admit we live in a sick society hindering an individual's potential to stay well.
Anankelogy starts with a more holistic approach. Instead of relying on the medical model or internal cognitive processes, which reveals a Western bias toward hyper-individualism that overlooks socioenvironmental factors, anankelogy balances both internal components of wellness with external components. Anankelogy recognizes that wellness is psychosocial.
Conventional thinking generally assumes our dysfunctions exist squarely within our individual selves. We must have made some wrong choices that keep us trapped in pain. If only we applied ourselves, started making better choices, and asserted the willpower to remain disciplined. Then we could finally escape our pain. Or so goes conventional thinking.
Anankelogy debunks such a hyper-individualistic narrow view. For starters, anankelogy recognizes pain as your body warning you of some perceived threat to your ability to function. The greater the threat and more vital the area of the threatened function, the more intense the pain.
Most of these threats are real and come from outside of the pained individual. Pain typically points to some problem from unresolved needs. Pain is not the problem as much as the threats to functioning that pain exists to warn us about.
Anankelogy gives context to the variety of such pain from pressing problems. Anankelogy identifies four levels of human problems provoking your pain. Each of these point to some threat to your wellness.
Personal problems. These often constrict you capacity to fully function until you make some personal alterations within your responsiveness.
Interpersonal problems. These generally limit your capacity to function until you work out your differences and respond to each other's affected needs.
Power problems. These tend to significantly restrict your ability to function, depending on the recourse available to you.
Structural problems. These can severely restrict your ability to function with little if any resource.
For example, if you live an environment where junk food is easily available while quality meals are less accessible, you face a structural problem that could easily pull you into painful dysfunction.
But the more you can reliably access primary resources like healthy foods, the better you can function. If you could grow all the food your body requires, than you could come closer to sustaining full wellness, full peakfunctionality. The social and political arrangements of modern society tends to make that increasingly impossible.
We all find ourselves vulnerably dependent upon economic forces beyond our personal control to supply us with the food we need. When not adequately available, or when we find it challenging to find the time and energy to prepare a decent meal, we often opt for quick processed foods.
It's easy to argue that we should all prioritize eating healthily. But the more we face the complicating details of modern life, the easier we can admit how our food choices get readily manipulated by structural patterns beyond our control.
Once I opt for processed foods, I find I have less energy to prepare a better meal. The more time I save from microwaving quick meals, the more I commit much of that time to fulfill my social obligations. Which leaves me less time to cook next time.
My growing dependence on microwaveable food can be described as a coerced poor option dependence (or CoPOD for short). Social pressures may coerce me to occasionally choose the easiest option available. As my energy declines, that occasional choice turns routine. My rare bouts of indigestion start to become a daily norm.
The more you struggle with pain from unmet needs, the more naturally drawn to pain relief. But then you tend to ignore the underlying need. Which prompts more pain. The more you neglect your pain-reported needs, the further you slip into less wellness. And eventually find yourself getting sick.
Anankelogy identifies this pattern as symfunction capture. Whether from poor choices or coerced into accepting the only options available, you acclimate to fewer needs resolving. A few unmet needs expands to several. Neglecting your low priority needs (like satisfying your vocational goals) can slip into neglecting your more essential needs (like personal security).
Anankelogy views what we call "illness" as significantly diminished functioning. Before you label yourself as "sick", your ability to function often undergoes a steady decline. You may not feel this decline as a path toward pathology. You may not even recognize the many components of wellness slipping out of your reach. Anankelogy recognizes this dynamic for you. And sheds light on what it truly means to be sick, and to be well again.
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