Living in an Age of Anxiety

Each of us has an intimate knowledge of anxiety in its many forms and subtle qualities. 

• Apprehension
• Fear
• Distress
• Uneasiness
• Disquiet
• Agitation
• Upset
• Worry
• Torment
• Fretting
• Angst
• Foreboding
• Misgiving
• Tension
• Stress
• Nervousness
• Dread

The list is by no means comprehensive. We can certainly add other words to describe our particular experience of what it's like to be anxious.

Not surprisingly, it’s now the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder. As a result, it’s been talked about and written about everywhere. New York Times ran an opinion section called Anxiety, which published 70 pieces that ended last summer. 

And just the other day I listened to a radio interview for the book My Age of Anxiety by John Stossel, a well-respected journalist. I look forward to reading it — an account of living with this debilitating mental illness since childhood and brief histories other notable people who suffered from anxiety. He said he had tried psychotropic medications to treat the symptoms of anxiety. (Benzodiazepines are the go-to drugs to treat anxiety, and it includes Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin and others.) He said he found mindfulness-based meditation practice, yoga and psychotherapy — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — to be just as effective and without dangerous of side effects and the possibility of dependence. 

And then I found an article published in New York Magazine in 2012 called Listening to Xanax. It described the ways in which a New Yorker, or its ideal reader — affluent, professionally successful, sophisticated, narcissistic — dealt with life’s inevitable “problems”. Given the frenetic pace of life and the constant exposure to too-muchness of a fabulous life, it condoned popping a benzo here and there. To its credit, a couple of quotes by Steven C. Hayes, the psychologist who came up with ACT, was included; his take was that our brains have yet to become flexible enough to cope with modern life’s overwhelming stimuli.

The take away was that self-medicating with a serious medication to cope with situational or functional anxiety (as opposed to an actual psychiatric disorder) was okay, as long as you don’t over do it. To this end, everyone mentioned in the piece, including the author who admitted to being an occasional a pill popper, made it known that they weren’t addicts.

I have much more to say about this so stay tuned...