archive.ph
Anxiety is a sign that you haven’t fully made sense of something in the past. Because the only way that the future can feel threatening is if you’re afraid that something you know you can’t handle is going to happen again. Memories that haven’t been fully processed will linger: https://x.com/SchrodingrsBrat/status/1685262615231021057
More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.
Work in Progress, The Atlantic • America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety
Keely Adler added
In personal life, the shrinking of one’s future horizons is a kind of illness, associated with poor physical and mental health. It can happen because of stress and poverty, and it is also associated with reduced IQ. Being under pressure literally makes people less intelligent than they are otherwise, often fuelling a vicious spiral of bad decisions
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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.
Vincent Deary • How We Break
Debbie Foster added
Because we live in a free-floating state of anxiety, we don’t even need a problem to set off a stream of disaster scenarios. Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.
Tara Brach • Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame
Studies find that anxious people tend to wallow, obsess over issues, and blame themselves.
Marisa G. Franco, PhD • Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends
Psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson have a theory I love called depressive realism. It’s the idea that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is.