Anxiety???

Here’s one that’s on my mind a lot. Mental health. Ever since I arrived at college I’ve noticed more and more and more and more people suffering from anxiety, depression, etc. And I find myself thinking WHAT THE F**K IS GOING ON??? I hear a lot of people asking the same question too. When in reality, we know the answers. We know them but they’re hard to describe and harder to approach. The obvious answer is that we live in a time where people are more stressed than ever. People are stressed over work, relationships, family, their future… The list goes on. And that’s a given. Society is more complex and advanced than ever. And things that are new tend to be things that stress people out the most.

But I think there’s a few things missing that don’t get talked about enough.

It’s not the growing fear of failure, it’s the way failure is being perceived. The majority of things that stress people out are short term issues— things that’ll pass soon enough. But the way we perceive potential failure in those things is what really amplifies anxiety. My dad always nags me that Millennials and gen Z have short attention spans and I typically brush it off but what if he’s right? What if we genuinely have trouble seeing the big picture? What if the cause of our anxiety epidemic is just that we take our failures too seriously because we’re overly focused on the short-run? Wiser people always tend to be more relaxed. I think it might be because they know that most issues are temporary and even most failures only have temporary consequences.

Another factor that I believe contributes to our generational epidemic is our use of absolutes. Here’s what I mean. For some reason, young people today tend to put each other in boxes. We like to put people in one of a small number of categories. For example, many of us try to discern whether someone is liberal or conservative. Back in middle school, people were either “cool” or “uncool”. Nowadays I hear a lot of talk about guys being either “alpha” or “beta”. First of all, the whole trend with this terminology baffles me and I think it’s nonsense to label infinitely complex human beings in such a primitive way. But that’s besides the point which is that having these boxes, especially for young men, makes failure seem like it’s not an option. Sure, we should avoid failure to the best of our ability but the notion that failing at something makes you a “beta”, an inferior person, can do nothing but increase feelings of fear and ultimately lead to hopelessness.

Oh yeah. Let’s not forget about the big one. DRUGS. Countless individual experiences and research show that trying to self-medicate with unprescribed drugs is dangerous and usually counterproductive. Obviously it’s not super “chill” of me to be saying this but I don’t think this factor is as well understood as it needs to be. The rates of abuse for anxiety medication are through the roof and I can’t even exaggerate how many people I know started abusing drugs like Xanax and ended up with worse anxiety than they had before.

Anxiety is a real issue and I think we all agree that it’s better to stop it at the source than to alleviate the symptoms when it happens.

Focus on the big picture. Don’t be quick to label each other. Don’t self medicate.

Filip, again.