When it’s three o’clock in the morning and you’re anxious, the whole world doesn’t exactly fall apart, but stretches endlessly before you. On one such night recently, I sat in a ball on the desk chair in my home office and breathed rapidly but quietly, so as not to wake my husband sleeping in the next room. My mind, incapable of holding one thought for more than a few seconds, communicated in zaps and bolts that traveled down my spine. A car drove by outside and I thought about how much I would have liked to trade places with its driver, with anyone who was awake at this hour not because they were panicked but because they were leaving a club or driving to work or taking their infant around the block in a last-ditch effort to get them to sleep. San Francisco was dark and still outside my window, but inside, I was suffering.
In America, 40 million people live with some form of anxiety. It ranges from the annoying to the completely debilitating, varying from person to person and from day to day. It affects women almost twice as much as it does men. Economists estimate that our collective anxiety costs billions of dollars in missed work and distraction every year. The relational and cultural costs are harder to estimate, but they exist and cause their own problems. Anxiety takes many forms, some of them contradictory: neediness and aloofness, empathy and disregard. But most of all, the shape of anxiety is fear. And we don’t live in a culture that encourages us to understand our anxiety. We are told to get over it, or else to use it as fuel to motivate us toward the more capitalistically appropriate goal of “success.” I once saw a therapist who told me to take my anxiety by the hand every time it popped up and walk it out the door. “Just keep doing it,” she nodded at me, “and eventually, it will stay out.” I tried this trick for hours, but the anxiety came back immediately after each dismissal. Ironically, in this case, trying to get rid of anxiety kept me from getting any work done.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Turner, go to https://psmag.com/learning-to-...d5c163d32#.c69m5gfy6]
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