Alain de Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education: An Emotional Education

Anxiety is not a sign of sickness, a weakness of the mind or an error for which we should always seek a medical solution. It is mostly a hugely reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty and riskiness of existence.

Anxiety and depression are not abnormal. They are not pathologies or aberrations. They are just one end of a spectrum of normal experience playing out on the same mechanisms that allow us to survive.

We panic because we rightly feel how thin the veneer of civilization is, how mysterious other people are, how improbable it is that we exist at all, how everything that seems to matter now will eventually be annihilated, how random many of the turnings of our lives are, how much we are prey to accident. Anxiety is simply insight that we haven’t yet

We understand the importance of speaking about mental health with the same degree of legitimacy as physical health. However, in the same way that we’d question what someone keeps tripping over if they repeatedly sprain their ankle, a lot of anxiety is similarly circumstantial, as many illnesses are. Specifically, anxiety tends to be the result of a

Anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion are often symptoms of a wider and deeper malaise. They are not free-floating afflictions, but symptoms arising from the way we relate to each other, ourselves, and to the world itself. They are signals that there is something wrong in our lives. They are signs to which we need to pay attention.

Anxiety is, at its core, an inappropriate response in light of the circumstances—very different from the cares and concerns in life that cause people to attend to business in a responsible way. Stress and pressure, instead of being things to avoid, strengthen us to accomplish the challenges God sets before us in life.

Anxiety is the warning sign that we’re too much in the past or the future—and being there is affecting how we make choices in the present.