Saving Schrödinger's Cat

Slouching my way out of Anxiety

For this entry, I am taking a page from other bloggers and going over an article, responding to it point by point. I’m not sure if this is the best way to write a blog, but it’s certainly a way to claw yourself past a dry spell and maybe juice a little creativity and thoughtfulness in the process. Not the most original thing for me to do, but here it is.

Anxiety and depression is a subject that’s been done to death this past year, and yet the antidepressant med market is projected to continue to rise into the next two years. I’m saying to invest in Pfizer. No, not really. This isn’t an investment article. But to say that it’s been a trying time would be an understatement, among a pile of other understatements, and there is no denying that the times have taken a toll on our health. To that end, an article just hit Time magazine on the subject of anxiety:

https://time.com/6099133/why-you-feel-tired-all-the-time/

A little over a month ago, I started feeling more fatigued than usual. Just about everything in my life—from getting out of bed to exercising to writing to coaching to reading—required a significant amount of activation energy.

Naturally there was the anxiety that accompanies the loss of employment due to the pandemic, but the job market is well on the way toward recovering. And many jobs have transition to the work-at-home model, which removes the stress of rush-hour traffic and making it into the office on time before Bill Lumbergh can make his way to your cubicle, coffee cup in hand, passive-aggressive admonishment on the tip of his tongue.

These struggles are not new. They were a common theme over the past three years in my reporting on The Practice of Groundedness, and they were a large part of what drove me to write the book. But they are intensifying. Google searches for the phrase “Why am I tired all the time?” have been at their historical highs between July 2021 and September 2021.

Ah, so you have a book to plug. Well, that’s okay I guess. As long as we benefit? As for Google searches, sometimes they’re a self-perpetuating thing.

There are, of course, many reasons for our collective fatigue: a year-and-a-half-long pandemic, social unrest and democratic backslide—to name just a few.

True enough. Maybe my personal issues figure into it as well. To what extent is generally being a train wreck a factor?

But even beyond these obvious drivers, I think there is something else going on: We are replacing excitement with anxiety.

Do tell.

Even the calmest, most equanimous people benefit from at least occasional periods of excitement. There is a reason that “flat-lining” is associated with death. We thrive with some degree of oscillation in our lives. The pandemic has, by and large, taken these punctuated bouts of excitement away.

So, the problem is actually boredom?

Attending concerts, sporting events, movies, even going to restaurants (let alone taking a proper vacation) are not as straightforward as they used to be.

Masks, vaccine mandates, and the trepidation of facing an invisible plague lurking among the masses interfering with our fun.

Consider this-all-too common example: You are feeling kind of sluggish and bored, so you go online and check trending topics on social media or visit any of the major news websites. You are not going to these destinations to learn anything specific, per se. You are going because you want a jolt to your otherwise flat-lining system. The jolt comes in the form of a horror story about politics, COVID-19, Afghanistan or any number of other unsettling topics.

The insidious doom-scroll. Of course we’ve been doing this for years, but when it’s all we have, it becomes a weight on our psyche to lug around. Maybe that’s why we’re all so tired. From lugging the weight. God, I really need to work out.

Put it all together and not only are we lacking many sources of positive and energizing excitement, but we are replacing them with negative and exhausting sources of anxiety.

The downward spiral. So now what?

The solution, I believe, requires three steps. First, we need to stop replacing our desire for excitement with anxiety.

Just don’t do it!

Second, we need to do everything possible to insert some positive excitement into our lives in a way that feels safe.

Now do something else…

Third, we need to be patient. While there is still much that we can do that is safe, it is also true that there is much we can’t.

Lord, grant me the strength to accept… yadda, yadda. I get it.

I looked up Brad Stulberg’s Amazon page, and it turns out he’s a regular publisher of self-help books. Self-help is a mightily crowded field, and I hope Brad isn’t suffering too much anxiety over it. This article gives a glimpse into a possible pervasive problem we are experiencing as a result of multiple negative inputs. It does read as bemoaning first-world problems, but that would too easily dismiss problems with real consequences, such as depression. The article doesn’t go into great detail (you have to buy the book, I guess.) But it hits on the real anxieties that keep us awake at night and grinds us down during the day. Brad suggests unplugging to deal with it. Perhaps that beats drinking oneself into a stupor every night.

In any case, Dune comes out late October. That’s as much excitement as I’ve experienced lately. I might do a blog post about it afterward. In the meantime, go look for something exciting to do (that won’t kill you) and leave off the doom-scroll.