Anxiety – Be Careful
What You Wish For

Lucy Beney

“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility”.

From The Concept of Anxiety, by Søren Kierkegaard, first published in 1844.

Introduction

Among the young people with whom I work, one issue appears more frequently than any other: anxiety.  This is not surprising, as anxiety – along with depression, its close sibling – currently tops the list of mental health issues worldwide.  Occasionally, anxiety relates to a particular situation – such as exams, or some other specifically challenging circumstance or experience.  More often, though, young people find it hard to explain what they are anxious about. They are suffering with something more akin to an existential dread, or continual fear that something bad is about to happen. 

The Backstory

We have seemingly forgotten that anxiety – or ‘angst’ – is an integral part of the human condition, especially for teenagers.  It is the cornerstone of existential philosophy – that tension between the certain and the uncertain, the known and the unknown, that lies at the heart of life.  It is unlikely that the human race would have survived this far, if we hadn’t had anxiety to guide our ingenuity and sense of self-preservation.  Increasingly, though, anxiety has become a subject of concern and debate. Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote his book, The Concept of Anxiety, as long ago as 1844.  By 1961, in an editorial entitled ‘The Anatomy of Angst’,[1] Time magazine had declared the mid-twentieth century “an era that is almost universally regarded as the Age of Anxiety”.  Now we have The Anxious Generation,[2] so devastatingly described by Jonathan Haidt in his recent book.

There is a theme which runs through this commentary – the ever-more-influential effects of change, freedom and choice on the human psyche.  For most of our history, human beings have not had much freedom or choice over many aspects of their lives.  At the same time, not much changed, decade-on-decade.  People tended to live lives very similar to those of their parents and grandparents.  The Enlightenment then brought with it new knowledge and ideas.  The Industrial Revolution followed, with radical changes wrought to working life and across society.  The pace of change accelerated.  In some ways, we have now become victims of our own success. 

All Change

While wealth, education and progress have undoubtedly changed our lives for the better, the price is permanent – almost daily – change, which results in intolerable stresses on culture and society.   We know that human beings struggle with change and uncertainty. While we all need to feel some sense of agency in our lives, we have now built an illusion of infinite choice and freedom.  This leads to a new set of dilemmas. What should I choose?  What if I make the wrong decision?  What if I can’t answer the question posed at the end of Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem, The Summer Day: “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”.[3]

The Rush to Diagnose

The effects of these huge changes in society on the wellbeing of our children have become painfully obvious. However, rather than honestly acknowledging this, striving to rebuild solid foundations and equipping children with the tools they need to cope with the pace of progress, we continue to diagnose and treat their ‘mental disorders’, as if these were randomly occurring, organic illnesses.  This can be likened to prescribing paracetamol to bring down a fever, without addressing what is causing the fever in the first place.

We now have a growing array of anxiety disorders.  If in doubt, the catch-all is ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ (GAD).  Frequently, young people arrive for a first counselling session and portentously announce their self-diagnosis. They have ‘got anxiety’.  For them, this is then somehow set in stone and is a ‘mental illness’ which primarily deserves respect and accommodation.  Where young people have done their homework, they may even be convinced that it is a symptom of something else, such as autism.  On occasion, I have heard anxiety described as ‘my disability’.  Anxiety has, for many, become a weapon for “dominating others, who would rather yield to unreasonable demands than be made to feel guilty”.[4]

I do not doubt the crippling effects of severe anxiety.  Surely, however, the aim of therapy should be to explain how a natural response has gone into overdrive, and to explore strategies for managing these feelings.  Often, however, the child’s expectation is that any therapy will reinforce their diagnosis and lead to arrangements being made to adapt their world, granting them exceptions to normal rules and expectations.  This is neither helpful nor constructive in the long term.

Changing Direction

In order to help our children and young people, I believe that there are three distinct aspects of the ‘anxiety epidemic’ which need to be revisited.  Broadly these are:

1.     An understanding of normal emotional reactions.

2.     Our response to childhood and adolescent anxiety.

3.     A commitment to address factors contributing to the surge in anxiety.

Unfortunately, now, there appears to be little or no understanding that human beings are designed to feel a full range of emotions – and that some of these may be undesirable, but necessary. Emotions are signals, generated by what is going on around us and they tell us something useful.  It is normal for us to feel things deeply, and to react to events.  Ideally, as we grow, we learn to manage those emotions so that they can be expressed healthily and appropriately.

Currently, instead, there seems to be a belief that unless we are happy all the time and life is perfect, there must be something wrong.  This is fuelled by social media, but also exacerbated, I believe, by an ever-increasing emphasis on ‘mental health’ and wellbeing. 

Much of the narrative suggests that if you are not feeling good, if you are not succeeding, there might be something ‘wrong with you’ and help should be sought.  While the ‘ups’ of life are celebrated, increasingly the normal ‘downs’ of life are pathologised.  Linked with this, is the idea of being ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘triggered’ by people, situations or opinions, which should then be avoided at all costs.  The consequence of this is a generation growing up who readily adopt victimhood, show little resilience in the face of challenge and are unable to take responsibility for themselves or accept their own agency.

We appear to have lost sight of the fact that courage involves conquering our fears and anxieties - not avoiding them. Competence breeds confidence, and yet we seem determined to cushion our children from becoming competent in managing their anxiety and fail to provide the tools necessary for living in a world which will always be uncertain and volatile.

Where there is a specific issue, therapy should provide an opportunity to look at that fear, and to ‘name it to tame it’ - an effective way of managing difficult feelings, suggested by Dr Dan Siegel in his book The Whole Brain Child.[5]    The therapist can then offer the tools and strategies to build resilience and enable the child to move beyond their fears.  Successful therapy will ensure that the child can then use these skills at other testing times of life.

Solid Foundations

When the young person does not know why they are anxious, we should be exploring what is happening in their life more widely - once again experiences, environment and relationships will provide important clues.  No meaningful discussion of the crisis of anxiety among young people can take place without shining a light on wider social trends and their impact on those growing up.  There are three vital elements necessary for children’s healthy growth.  Currently, all three of these essential areas are being undermined.  If we would like our children to grow up to be resilient, with independence of mind and a sense of their own responsibility and agency, we need to address them urgently. These are:

1.     In order to feel secure, and be confident ‘to grow wings’, children need to have ‘roots’.  They need to be securely attached and know that someone – or a group of people, usually their family - has their back, whatever happens.

2.     They need to be able to establish an identity growing up, which develops organically and over time, and which reflects the huge mosaic of thoughts, feelings, attitudes and influences which makes up each human being.

3.     In order to be able to grow, children need to be curious, to experiment with choices, and to learn and build competence.  Inevitably, they will make mistakes, as everyone does.  They then need to know that they can come back from these mistakes, try again, that they can change their minds – and if necessary, apologise and be forgiven.

Security

Let us start with the first of these – the need for secure attachment and meaningful, real-life connection with other human beings.  Far too many children and young people feel alone and isolated.  When asked, “Who do you feel has your back, when something goes wrong?”, often there will be a long silence and then a mumbled, “Nobody”.  Whether this is true or not, too often this is the child’s perception.  In many cases, parents are busy and either physically or emotionally unavailable.

In his book, Why Therapy Works,[6] American therapist Louis Cozolino explains that “the emotional unavailability of the parent is experienced as rejection and interpreted as ‘I’m not important, valuable or lovable enough to be secure in my membership of the family’ – which feels life threatening when your survival depends upon your family’s protection”.   He continues, “children can’t comprehend the idea of quality time, leading them to interpret the amount of time spent together as love”.

As more and more parents work longer hours, as mothers and fathers ‘pass like ships in the night’ to keep financially afloat and as politicians of all hues encourage the return of the mothers of infants to the work place at the earliest opportunity, what are our children missing?  It is the consistent, responsive relationship with a loving and responsible adult – that person whom they know and who knows them intimately.  The result is children who do not know their parents in any meaningful sense, and their parents certainly don’t know them – and that is scary.

Identity

Secondly, our children are not being allowed to develop a multi-faceted identity, naturally over time.  The insistent, insidious voice of identity politics has reduced a highly complex, natural process to a number of adolescent ‘box ticks’, covering a very limited range of characteristics, most notably concerning ‘gender’, sexual orientation and ethnicity.  These identities are then worn like badges of honour, marking out the tribe to which the young person belongs – until they don’t.  The whole process is fraught with anxiety. 

Eager to conform, the lie at the ideological heart of this approach is overlooked. We only ‘identify’ as something when we know we are not actually that thing. It is entirely novel and unnatural to ‘pick an identity’ from an ever-changing and expanding menu – and there is always the sneaking suspicion that the ‘wrong’ choice might have been selected.  The consequences of this, or having the wrong opinions, can be brutal. Immediate ‘cancellation’ follows, and ostracism from the ‘community’ of which the young person thought they were a part.  Bullying and manipulation are commonplace.  This has, on occasion, led tragically to suicide.[7]

Connection

At the same time, the elements from which traditionally we drew the solid pillars of our identity - family, community and religious belief – have fractured, and in many cases completely collapsed.  We used to know, with a degree of certainty, who our family was.  Now, with shifting relationships, too many children struggle to work out even who their siblings are.  A ‘step dad’ can be a man to whom their mother is married, but he can also be someone their mother met online a couple of weeks ago.  There is little sense of security or permanence.  There is no solid, consistent support network of others whose names and faces you know, and on whom you can rely. 

Finally, without a belief in something beyond ourselves, we can all too easily worship the self, or we can invent substitute deities – for example, the state (think ‘our NHS’), or a political cause such as the environment.  As modern-day prophets warn of impending doom on all fronts, without context or balance, anxiety levels sky-rocket.  At the same time, an additional burden descends – each young person can feel that they alone are now responsible for righting the worlds wrongs before inevitable catastrophe strikes.   They also have the more recent ethical dilemmas to navigate, without a clear framework.  Widespread debate around abortion and ‘assisted dying’ leave children acutely aware of the vulnerability and expendability of those who are unwanted, or very old or ill.  Instinctively knowing human beings’ limitations, all of this can be profoundly unsettling.  It leads back to the “nearly unbearable message that man is alone in a meaningless cosmos, subject only to the blind forces of evolution and responsible only to himself”.[8]

Curiosity, Challenge and Choice

This brings me to the third point.  The natural curiosity and experimentation necessary for children to grow has become woefully restricted.  A culture of ‘safetyism’ has limited opportunities for children to stretch themselves physically and experience unsupervised, free play outside.  Adults have taken over the playground, often not only directing games but frequently scanning the scene for evidence of something amiss.  This engenders the idea that the big wide, world is a dangerous place, when in fact, a child is far more likely to come to harm online.  It also stunts the essential ability to manage situations alone.

At a workshop in London in 2019, existential therapist Ernesto Spinelli looked at the subject of ‘choice’.[9]  The sheer number of choices now available – and also the proliferation of ‘false choices’ – are undermining our children’s wellbeing.  Of course, we want to encourage children to find and use their talents, and work hard to succeed, but too often children are told they ‘can be anything they want to be, if they try hard enough’.  As Spinelli explained, too often this results in us wanting “to walk down the road which we think should be there for us, but which is not there”.  When the road chosen is impassable, the journey becomes ever more anxious.  As the 1961 Time magazine article explained, we are promoting a kind of ‘compulsory freedom’ that encourages people sometimes to defy very real limitations.

Smile, It Might Never Happen

Finally, it is very obvious, just observing everyday discourse, that we have suffered an extraordinary sense of humour failure in the western world.  Evidently there are some pressing problems to be addressed - however, we have started to regard everything deadly seriously, and often as a personal threat.  Casual comments and sincerely held beliefs become ‘hate speech’; we ‘catastrophise’ daily, over politics and climate change; and we see everything without nuance, in black-and-white, binary terms (except of course the one thing that is binary - gender).  This is both irresponsible and has a profoundly damaging effect on our children. Back in the 1950s, Viktor Frankl - who had survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp – reminded us that, “the neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure”.[10]

Conclusion

We live in a world in a state of flux – but the great strength of human beings is that we can learn to adapt.  Every era has its challenges.  Without anxiety, we would be less well prepared for this. As Kierkegaard emphasised, we need to take the lessons of anxiety and use them for the purposes of living better – to focus on the present, to solve problems, to express gratitude for what we have and to rediscover real meaning and focus in life.  In her podcast, Overthink, Dr Ellie Anderson, a philosophy professor, reminds us that “when we feel anxiety and take the leap anyway, we are realising our identity as spirit, we’re being as fully human as we can possibly be.  We are making the movement of faith”.[11] This is what we need to teach our children to do, if they are to walk confidently into the future.

“There is great danger in falling in love with our own suffering”.

from a letter to Time magazine, regarding the ‘The Anatomy of Angst’ editorial, 14th April 1961.

[1] Time, The Anatomy of Angst, 31 March 1961.

[2] Haidt, J, (2024), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Allen Lane.

[3] Oliver, M, (1992), New and Selected Poems: Volume I, Beacon.

[4] Time, The Anatomy of Angst, 31 March 1961.

[5] Siegel, D and Bryson T P, (2012), The Whole Brain Child, Robinson.

[6] Cozolino, L,  (2016), Why Therapy Works, Norton.

[7] The Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2024, Oxford’s Cancel Culture is Putting Lives at Risk, Serenhedd James.

[8] Time, The Anatomy of Angst, 31 March 1961.

[9] Workshop on ‘Choice’, 2019, Ernesto Spinelli, Therapy Harley Street.

[10] Frankl, V, (1959), Man’s Search for Meaning, Rider.

[11] Overthink podcast, Kierkegaard: The Concept of Anxiety, Dr Ellie Anderson, 24 February 2023.