Why we shouldn’t worry so much about anxiety

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Once, as an intern, a veteran reporter told me that if I was ever asked the classic “What do you think makes a good journalist?” question in a job interview, there was only one correct answer: paranoia.

I confess to being somewhat perplexed at the time, but 10 years later I understand. They weren’t encouraging me to go around imagining that the whole world was chasing me. Rather, they reminded me of a journalist’s responsibility to publish accurate and fair information. It was a warning against complacency. A little nudge, if you will, to hold on to some good old-fashioned anxiety.

He needn’t have worried too much about me: I’m quite familiar with the pulse-pounding, breath-shortening charms of anxiety, which extend to my work. But he was also tapping into an insight that a growing body of research is pointing to: Anxiety is not something we can or even should try to completely eradicate, and that we actually need some of it to perform well, and even to help. Let’s lead happy and fulfilling lives.

Of course, it must be said that beyond a certain point anxiety can become debilitating and clinical intervention is needed to treat severe anxiety disorders. But it seems that we live in a society that is increasingly anxious about the very existence of anxiety.

It was the topic of last week’s Mental Health Awareness Week, organized by the Mental Health Foundation. On the foundation’s “anxiety statistics” page, we’re told that in 2022-2023, 37 percent of women and 30 percent of men in Britain reported high levels of anxiety, up from 22 percent. percent and 18 percent respectively from 2012 to 2015 – an increase often attributed to increased use of social media, as well as concerns about external threats from climate change, AI, and pandemics. Above the statistics, there are an advert: “This content mentions anxiety, which some people may find triggering.”

But what if part of the problem is that we’re thinking about anxiety in the wrong way? TO study published in Emotion, a peer-reviewed journal, in march found that judging emotions as positive or negative can have crucial implications for our well-being.

“Meta-anxiety, anxiety about anxiety, is exactly what is destroying us,” Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, clinical psychologist and author of Future tense: why anxiety is good for you (even if it feels bad), tells me. “That is why we are having this mental health crisis now. We are talking about it incorrectly.”

Dennis-Tiwary says that instead of trying to avoid anxiety, we must face it in order to develop skills and emotional resilience to help us manage it. Also, by framing it negatively, we miss out on the opportunity to tap into the more positive traits it can bring: vigilance, focus, motivation, and a burst of energy that can help us perform at our best.

If we don’t always frame it as something negative, we can experience what some neuroscientists call “good anxiety.” “Good anxiety is situational, limited in time, and highly motivating,” Morra Aarons-Mele, author of the eager achiever: Turn your biggest fears into your leadership superpower, tells me. “It’s the anxiety we need to do great things, and often the anxiety we feel because we care, because we’re emotionally invested in the outcome, because we want to be great. Since we are very scared, we are going for it ”.

That’s all well and good, you might think, but given how crippling anxiety can feel, how can we take advantage of the “good” variety when we’re in the grip of its horror? One way is to respond physiologically: doing breathing exercises that let us know we’re safe by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, or engaging in physical activity, which releases feel-good endorphins and serotonin.

But another technique is something Harvard Business School psychologist Alison Wood Brooks has called “anxiety reappraisal.” When we feel anxious, our bodies and brains are in a state of heightened arousal and alertness that is similar to, and sometimes indistinguishable from, arousal. Our heart rate quickens, adrenaline surges, and we gear up for action. Brooks’ research suggests that reframing anxiety with simple tweaks, like saying “I feel excited” instead of “I feel anxious,” can be surprisingly effective.

Of course, when anxiety has reached a point where it is difficult to carry on with daily life, these techniques are unlikely to be enough. But if we experience it on a more moderate level, we should try to see it for what it is: a normal, even healthy, human emotion on which our very survival as a species has been based. If you’re never anxious, you’re probably not alive.

jemima.kelly@ft.com