A cure for anxiety will take a change in society. A Political solution that encourages community, inclusiveness, and towns/cities that aren't broken by design.
"Your mental health issues cannot be solved by anything short of a societal shift."
I agree that there's a lot of things we could change as a society to meaningfully improve mental health but that takes time and people need assistance now. Personally, I've temporarily relocated to Barcelona for my mental health and physical health because being able to walk anywhere without needing to fight cars is an incredible gift to me - the lower barrier helps me walk longer and more frequently. I wish more of the world was like this - but it'll take a while to accomplish that.
Anxiety is a valid emotion that’s trying to warn you that your surrounding is not good. If anxiety is happening at the scale we’re seeing in the world, then calling it an individual problem is outright wrong.
Anyway, my point is, “I’m a victim” isn’t a reinforcement to anxiety. It’s an understanding that what you’re feeling is a valid emotion and to work around it rather than try to actively combat it on an individual level.
This is a byproduct of mass/social media exploiting that mechanic in individuals to keep people tuned in. Fear, obligation or guilt gets to 99% of people. Let's talk about Fear.
Everyone I know with anxiety issues is terminally-online or, before the internet, tuned in to the news every waking minute of their day. They are hyper-aware of the dangers of the world and are always in a falsely-heightened state of arousal.
It makes the world feel smaller and more dangerous than it actually is. It sucks that people are dying in Ukraine. But you don't live there, and have probably never even met a native Ukie. We aren't supposed to react to danger on the other side of the planet. But we're exposed to it and more nonetheless while powerless to do anything about it. It's reinforcing helplessness.
No animal can function this way. It would eventually become so skittish and paranoid it will start making mistakes, and run directly into the crocodile pit while trying to escape a yapping poodle.
The ignorant aren't immune to anxiety because they're retarded; they're tending to the lot in life they do have control over and reacting to dangers that directly threaten them.
The worst self-induced anxiety offenders are the ones who seek out other peoples' conflicts to involve themselves in.
How would that explain all the social anxiety out there?
It's cool that your relocation helped, I totally get the city routine helping people like us, walking, real food, pretty stuff to look at, culture, all in fingers reach, consider ourselves lucky for the experience of life quality improvement.
you don't resolve anxiety by adding more capacity to endure it (resilience.) Instead you need to address the root causes— most often maladaptive strategies learned in childhood that need to be relearned and corrected, and then once you are no longer creating the negative emotional material because you're living in a better way, you generally need to support healing/recovery from holding the anxiety however long you did. This often involves recreating or revising relationships with close loved ones.
adding more capacity to tolerate almost always makes things worse in the long run. you don't need a bigger tank to hold more poison, you need to stop creating or consuming the poison, and then you need to detoxify yourself to get rid of what you've already taken in.
disclaimer: I am a psychotherapist but I am not acting as anyone's therapist by sharing this, which is my opinion.
This is not to suggest that resilience is the only option for anxiety, or that it’s the best option in general or any specific case. But I do believe that if we’re discussing the problem of widespread anxiety, learned resilience ought to be part of the discussion. In many ways, it is a more practical (and personally actionable) response to widespread anxiety than waiting for sweeping societal changes which are unlikely to materialize.
For anyone who thinks these claims might be controversial, I’ll cite some leading authorities that most readers will trust not to misrepresent the scientific consensus:
According to the American Psychological Association, “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands…. Psychological research demonstrates that the resources and skills associated with more positive adaptation (i.e., greater resilience) can be cultivated and practiced.” https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience
The Mayo Clinic says that “resilience can help protect you from various mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/resilience-train...
Harvard Medical School faculty offer a course specifically on building resilience to manage anxiety and mental health: “If you’ve ever felt stressed, burned out, anxious or sad, you’re not alone. These moments are challenging and make it difficult to find a way forward. However, you can use science-backed tools to help manage these experiences and the emotions that come along with them.” https://www.harvardonline.harvard.edu/course/building-person...
I give my own reference below and a quotation from it.
“A meta-analysis found a moderate positive effect of resilience interventions (0.44 (95% CI 0.23 to 0.64) with subgroup analysis suggesting CBT-based, mindfulness and mixed interventions were effective.”
In my case I’m lifelong bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.
I’m definitely not a doctor. You shouldn’t trust medical/psychiatric information given in any internet comment though.
And to paraphrase the other commenter, “didn’t realize I needed to get your permission to write about something without the proper qualifications”.
I loosely agree, in the sense that the current common view is too focused on making the individual bear their own cross. But in a literal sense you are wrong, in that there are many who are helped by pills.
These are all downstream from the points mentioned.
> Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. (Carol Hanisch, 1970)
If you think strictly unidirectional, you‘ll end up at the Big Bang as the root of all suffering, and what would that achieve?
That’s besides the other factors I mentioned - if you look at studies of what substances pathogens in the stomach and microbiome produce, it turns out they can really cause anxiety. My take is that anxiety can be a multifactorial issue and a local minimum that one needs to climb out of actively. Accepting life as suffering might not give the impulse to get the necessary help.
/s