Why is Everyone So Much More Anxious These Days?
Three systemic causes--and what we can do about them
A year or so into COVID, I was doing corporate consulting work on mental health & wellbeing, and I shared prevalence data for anxiety that showed the bump through 2021.
In the years since, I’ve only seen anxiety balloon further. Sometimes I ask “Is it just me?” I’m a psychiatrist; am I a hammer, so everything’s a nail?
But no, the data above is clear: anxiety (and depression, too, but that’s another post) is increasing in prevalence.
Anxiety is complex and multi-faceted: genetics, neural wiring, the environment, and epigenetics all contribute.
There’s a genetic piece, certainly. You’re about 2-3x more likely to have an anxiety disorder if your parent had one.1
There’s the neural wiring piece: anxious thoughts become automatic—the “paved road” analogy I mention here—unless you do something intentional about them.
There’s the environmental piece: adverse childhood events, dysfunctional family dynamics, economic instability, political upheaval, war and displacement—all these factors shape your likelihood of internalizing that the world is a dangerous place. You learn you need to be on high alert
There’s also an epigenetic piece—how stress and environmental factors turn on certain genes that carry into subsequent generations (the genetic component of intergenerational trauma).2
And while as a psychiatrist I’m equipped to help others manage anxiety, I’m also personally invested in it since becoming a parent. I wonder how all this anxiety we have in this generation will trickle down into the next? I’m a child of immigrants, who themselves were children of upheaval and displacement.
I inherited anxiety. How do I not perpetuate it?
How much anxiety is part of the culture is hard to explain by just one thing.
There are many explanations one could point to: Overstimulation. Social media. School shootings. Rogue agents. Human trafficking. Inflation. Trump. Fascism. Processed foods. Microplastics. Colon cancer rates. Capitalism. Consumerism. Over-pathologizing. Over-prescribing. Over-everything.
Fundamentally though, I think all of it boils down to three main things:
Too much thinking
Too little action
Manufactured fragmentation
The Link Between Overthinking and Anxiety
Here’s where people misunderstand a common source of anxiety: anxiety is a feeling shaped in part by your thinking.
You’re not overthinking because you’re anxious. You’re anxious because you’re overthinking.
When you ruminate on the past or catastrophize the future, that elicits anxiety.
Modern society is ripe for overthinking: you've got a hundred apps on your phone, a thousand followers, all that wondering about them, what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, what they think of your online avatar, what they think about the real-in-person you, all the news, all the negativity, all the trending topics: all that online interfacing with a massive world inundates your brain.
Your psyche is not designed for this degree of exposure to people, news, accidents, catastrophe. This degree of cognitive consumption is the first of its kind in the human race.
“Information is a good thing,” you say. “It’s good to be prepared.” Not this much, I say. Not this often. And that preparedness? That’s the anxiety of hypervigilance.
Untapped Physical Energy Creates Physical Restlessness
Anxiety isn’t just a feeling or an emotional state—it manifests in the body too: sensitive stomachs, jaw clenching, muscle fatigue, inflammation.
Like the hygiene hypothesis example I wrote about here, in the most stable countries, when the immune system isn’t used, it redirects its energies against itself. I think of physical energy the same way.
We’re not meant to be sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and then on our phone for two hours, and then on the TV for another two hours. Humans aren’t designed for this degree of inactivity.3
We have untapped reserves of physical and creative energy that a large percent of the population is using to walk to their closet, put on an outfit, and record a video. It’s a reflection of how desperate we are to create and produce—but it’s misdirected, again, into the virtual world.
The body needs regular movement in the natural world. It used to get this when it lived there, and then at least some of it in urban centers with plenty of walking—it’s no wonder that the push towards the suburbs in the 50s correlated with sharp rises in anxiety.4
We Are Simultaneously The Most Connected and The Most Fragmented
There was something else about the 50s that set the foundation for where we are today: consumer spending rose post WWII, and “keeping up with the Jones’” became embedded in American culture, decimating the unified front established during the war the years before.
If bad times brought people together, good times drove them apart.
That competition and divisiveness spread through society. And this was systematic. Organized movements that bridged people together were squashed (the US government killed a leader of the Black Panther party in ‘69, and Vietnam war protestors at Kent State in ‘70). The Fairness Doctrine that helped regulate the news to present balanced views on issues was repealed in ‘87, leading to the polarization we see today.
And while wireless internet and social media were initially framed as connection-building, they ultimately created a much more insidious fragmentation: personalized algorithms in the early 2000s deepened divisiveness, creating alternating realities tailored to whomever was viewing the content.
Social media has led to the fragmentation of the individual psyche through decimating our attention spans and splitting ourselves into an avatar version and an embodied version. It’s also fragmented the collective—limited our interactions to the online sphere in lieu of the real word, trading deep connection with a select few for superficial connection with hundreds, and artificially dividing us along algorithmic lines.
The worst part of this is that we don’t realize how fragmented we are. We believe we are connected. And the anxiety stemming from that fragmentation becomes deeply unconscious.
Okay, So Everyone’s Anxious And Now We’re Screwed
That’s anxiety talking.
The world has always been chaotic and uncertain. If you grew up in the West, you became conditioned to think otherwise—often the stability we enjoyed stemmed in part from the instability wreaked elsewhere.
Anxiety is multi-faceted, as I said, which means no one intervention alone can resolve it. Medication is a tool that helps some. Therapy—psychodynamic, CBT, DBT—whatever fits. But the environmental piece? That requires less thinking, more doing. Less scrolling, more movement. Ideally with others, ideally in nature. Mindfulness practice. Spiritual grounding. Real world community.
These aren’t wellness trends; they’re the necessities of life that became relegated to the periphery.
Does it feel like swimming upstream? It can. Modern life has set numerous obstacles to a mentally healthy mind that policies and government show no signs of removing.
But collective power can shift this, from the individual choices that accumulate into cultural shifts. For me that has meant saying I’ve been in therapy, and it’s made me a better mother. My husband and I are in couples’ which creates a more connected base for our kids at home, and we go on walks together. My friends are my neighbors. We grab groceries for one another. We see each other at the mosque.
And once those rhythms are in place, it doesn’t really feel like swimming upstream anymore. It’s almost like that feeling is anxiety, too.
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5945734/
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31830309/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2888013/
Such an important piece. thank you!
As someone who's anxiety has manifested frustratingly over the last two years, it's helpful to recognize that the environment and our addiction to social media plays a part. And makes me at least feel as though I can have a little control over some aspects that make it worse.