First, We Make the Beast Beautiful
Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being highly strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet. I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sun set, their default response is, ‘Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.’ And they wear it as a badge of honour.
This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.
We suck it up when we feel anxious and soldier on until, well, we tip over the edge and our anxiety turns pathological and medical. Flipside, depressed behaviour - slovenliness, unproductiveness and suck-honey gloom - is something we abhor. Thusly, depression is an issue. And, thusly, we have lots of structures in place to identify and treat it.
Depression is stigmatised, anxiety is sanctified as propping up modern life, which ironically sees depression treated as a legitimate illness, and the anxious left in a cesspool of self-doubt and self-flagellation for not being better at coping with life. And so we buy each other Keep Calm and Carry On mugs as though that’s something you can just do.
But it gets worse, you see. We then try to cope by revving up the angst, don’t we? We use coffee and fast-speak and sugar and staying back at work longer. We grind harder. Try harder. Think harder. We should be able to work our way through this. We think this is what will fire us up out of our funk and get us back on our game. It’s a self-perpetuating pain - we use anxiety to fight our anxiety.
