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In the movie Inside Out 2, “Anxiety” is one of the new emotions joining the team in Riley’s mind.  As “Anxiety” thought Riley should focus on getting close to the popular players of the ice hockey team in order to increase her chance of getting a spot in the team, he took over the dashboard in her mind.  “Anxiety” kept feeding Riley with a lot of worrying thoughts about not performing well and unable to get into the team, this made her gradually develop a lot of doubts about herself.  This caused her to perform poorly and get penalty in the game.  This “anxiety-dominated sense of self” of Riley also made her focus too much on building new friendship with the team players and hurt her relationship with two close friends.  We all have “anxiety” in our mind.  This is a normal emotion that signals us we may be facing threats or danger.  In fact, optimal level of anxiety helps us to achieve good performance.  However, if “anxiety” took over the dashboard of our mind all the time, this may have a negative impact on our sense of self.

In psychology research, anxiety is currently theorized to be linked to an altered sense of self.  If a person is having high level of anxiety all the time, he or she may focus excessively on threats and dangers.  With “anxiety” dominated, a person may ruminate a lot about past and future experiences in a negative way.  For instance, Riley in the movie kept ruminating about performing poorly in the game the next day while she were in bed.  As a result, a person may start to doubt about oneself.  This may contribute to one trying to do excessive actions to strive for approval or recognition.  As in the movie, Riley even hurt the relationship with her two close friends for an exchange of befriending with the ice hockey team players.

Later in the moive, “Joy” returned to the headquarter with the help of “Sadness” and “Embarrassment”.  At first, “Joy” thought that she needed to substitute Riley’s original sense of self with all the good memories.  However, after contemplation, similar to “Anxiety”, “Joy” reflected that she had no rights to help Riley choose her sense of self.  In the end, all the positive and negative memories were reinstated into Riley’s mind.  This helps Riley to form a new sense of self, a holistic one with both positive and negative aspects of the self. 

We all have positive and negative aspects in our “Self”.  It is only when we embrace all these aspects, we find ourselves having the freedom to choose how to act according to the different circumstances we are facing.  For example, if we realized that we started to focus on ourselves to strive for success too much and ignore the needs of our close ones, we needed to embrace this negative aspect and then try to strike a balance to take care of others as well.  On the contrary, if we reflected that we tended to give all of our time to help others and ignore our own needs, we could try to pay more effort to take care of our own needs.

Human beings are complicated, and our sense of self is dynamic.  It is important for us to be more flexible to see ourselves and others.