Anxiety: the hottest kid in town

Panic attack

noun

1. A sudden overwhelming feeling of acute and disabling anxiety.

Anxiety

aŋˈzʌɪəti

noun

1. a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.

2. strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen.

Panic attacks… I have to confess I didn’t really believed in them before I experienced one. Some of my friends had told me about their personal encounters with anxiety but I just couldn’t fathom a situation in which someone could possibly lose complete control over their own mind. And then one day, without any warning or heads up, a panic attack shook me to the core.

For those of you who have never experienced a panic attack before, I can easily sum it up for you in a sentence: it feels like you’re dying…Although for me it also felt as if I was going completely insane.  

So, after going through this near insanity experience (as I like to catalogue it), I did what any good and respectable millennial I know would’ve done… I googled my symptoms. After watching YouTube videos on “Panick attacks explained” and “How to transform your anxiety into a tool for career success” I came upon a very interesting article that argued that “the cases of anxiety disorders are up 1200% over the past three decades”. 

I find it quite intriguing (or should I say disappointing?) that we live in a world where we’ve had enough technological and medical advances to pretty much eradicate, or at least confront, much of the diseases and ills that threaten our species... and yet we’re suffering from an anxiety epidemic… Let me rephrase that: a disease that has to do entirely with the health of our psyche, has been catalogued as the disease of our century… that simply can’t be right. It has even become a trend, we’ve normalised it to the point that entire companies have started to make a profit out of it. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the title of the fall/winter 2020 Vogue Magazine issue read: “How to channel your anxiety into putting together a killer Christmas outfit”.   

These increasing levels of anxiety could probably stem from the fact that our current system uses our social status as its currency, our personal value is dictated by our material achievements, and the level of our career successes is the measurement of our worth. In order to maintain this social position we’re forced to hide any sign of possible doubt, fear, guilt, envy, anger, failure, to name a few. We have to hold all these feelings inside and pretend we’re doing perfectly fine in every aspect of our lives, because if you don’t look like a perfectly well put Kardashian sister, then do you even exist? However, this unsustainable social order, avoids a key element that makes humans, humans: our flaws. We’re not perfect, we’re infinitely flawed, that’s part of the reason why religions were invented, or why justice systems were put into place, so the more we try to avoid our true nature, the more we become victimised by it… and hence, the more anxious we become. 

Furthermore, apart from being obliged to carry ourselves like royalty, our streets are filled with advertisements that work as an instruction book on how to look, what to wear, how to speak, where to go, who to marry, where to travel. Messages that are incessantly manipulating our unconscious minds in order to alter our consumption patterns, encouraging us to continue filling our closets, while ignoring any signs of emotional distress. The incompatibility between the magnitude of these aspirations compared to the reality of our condition is simply frustrating. As a result, our generation has mastered the art of evading these frustrations by looking at screens as an easy way to escape confronting our dilemmas; until the time comes when we have to go to bed at night and we feel such an overwhelming unease that sleeping becomes one of our biggest challenges…and so our anxiety builds up. 

And then, last but not least, we can’t obviate the fact that we live in a society that has historically revered education as the ultimate answer to all of our biggest problems, but even as universities have succeeded in delivering highly focused professionals, they have terribly failed in imparting wisdom and providing knowledge that’s inwardly beneficial to its students. There are no universities that provide well structured advice on how to live our lives… but don’t worry, we’re all familiarised with the imperative importance of knowing how financial markets work. 

None of our classes, at any educational level, encourage us to talk about our feelings, our preoccupations, our fears, our dreams, our relationships, our frustrations, our heartbreaks. We are taught everything from biology, to architecture and political science, but we know nothing about ourselves.  

I believe it’s time we all acknowledge that there’s something wrong with the system we so fervently revere. We have completely lost sight of the fact that even though we’re supposed to have adult powers of reasoning, the expectations that fall upon us in every regard of our lives; be it relationships, careers, family, or jobs...have become too big to meet. 

We all long to be heard and reassured, that’s a fact, so we should work towards legitimating this need rather than avoiding it. We should be able to make an honest approach towards our nature, to be free to openly talk about the things that ail us, to keep them from transforming into repressions. The more we avoid our nature and try to cover it up with a mask of perfection and the illusion of put togetherness, the more unstable and insecure we become. However, in order to be able to openly talk about our frustrations and anxieties, we first need a revaluation of our system, to make sure it’s not one that not only encourages these anxieties, but also fosters them. 

“As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.” 

― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

Sincerely yours, 

Natalia.