Our Cultural Narratives Are the Cause of Anxiety
What if it’s our body’s way of telling us this is not for us?
There is a link between the commonly accepted narratives and escalating numbers of people struggling with anxiety. But we haven’t yet identified the connection because we are misunderstanding the nature of anxiety.
The Mayo Clinic says, “The cause of anxiety disorders are not fully understood.” And that about sizes it up. While there is a plethora of scholarly articles that speak to the types of anxiety and how to treat them, there isn’t much of any real depth that illuminates its cause.
What if the feeling of anxiety — let’s say in some or many instances but not necessarily all — is the body’s natural response to commonly accepted narratives and the pressures that result from those narratives that are simply not healthy for us? What if it’s our body’s way of telling us this is not for us?
That famous scene in the 1967 film The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman in which his father’s friend takes the young Hoffman aside and says just one word to him, “Plastics,” illustrates how deeply a narrative based on a hollow belief system of money being the end all to our happiness affects young people who are striving to figure out what they want to do with their lives.
In 70s when I grew up the narrative was about getting good grades so you can go to college so you can get a degree so you can get a good job so you can make a good living, and so on. To some extent, this is still the narrative, but it’s changing rapidly.
In the U.S. we’ve eviscerated funding for the arts in the school system and redirected the focus toward academics and test scores. In the meantime Finland radically changed their education system eliminating standardized testing, reducing classroom time, emphasizing outdoor play and learning, increased individualized focus, and so many other changes resulting in soaring academic achievement as compared to the U.S. In fact, the U.S. is nearly at the bottom academically as compared to all other industrialized nations.
And at the same time we have escalating teenage anxiety disorder.
I’ve worked jobs that felt horrid to me, and I pushed on, thinking it was what I was supposed to do to make a living and provide for my family. I’ve pushed myself in many ways that felt heavy and hard (often manifesting itself as a form of anxiety) thinking that my resistance was a reflection of some failure or lacking in me, never realizing that the heaviness and anxiety was my body’s way of telling me that this was not for me.
Children with highly creative inclinations forced into a school system hell-bent on rote learning and conformity is stifling to say the least, anxiety producing for most, and even worse in some instances. But it’s easier for the machine of the modern American school system to label young ones with such things as “anxiety disorder” or “ADHD” and recommend medication to drug them into a subdued state of conformity than to address the root of the problem.
In 2019 Maria and I were rear ended twice in a period of two and a half weeks, and for a long time afterwards Maria felt a certain anxiety when in traffic and would watch her side view mirror for cars rapidly approaching as we slowed for traffic lights. This is just one form of anxiety. There is definitely a kind of anxiety that flows from emotional and physical trauma.
Both Maria and I feel a certain discomfort being in large cities with the fast-paced energy that feels frantic to us. Once we leave the city, and in particular as we traverse the eight miles of gravel roads to our remote dwelling place, we feel a peacefulness wash over us.
There are many forms of anxiety, but there is one highly prevalent form that is most simply our body trying to tell us something.
In episode 3 of our podcast on the Great Resignation Uncensored, we interviewed Ami who was working a job that felt meaningful to her. She had a very understanding boss who bent over backward to try and accommodate her needs, while she was having panic attacks in the morning as she prepared for work. She eventually came to the awareness that in spite of all the good of her job that it was not what she was supposed to be doing with her life. She made the connection, proffered her resignation, and immediately felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders and an end to her anxiety.
Now let’s take it a step further. What if the very nature of our culture is anxiety producing?
Here’s an example. When I was a young lad, and the weekend came around I would attend the stereotypical “kegger party” with my friends. Only I would feel a great deal of anxiety leading up to our departure and all through my time at these parties. While my friends where consuming large amounts of alcohol and other things, I would fill my red plastic cup with beer and nurse that one single cup throughout the night. As everyone else became inebriated I would feel even more uncomfortable. Many times I would leave without my ride and walk miles home in the middle of the night because I couldn’t bare to be there a minute longer.
I thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t party like my friends. It took several years of soul searching to figure out that I’m just not a party kind of person. I prefer deep and meaningful conversations and find small talk painful. That’s just me. No judgement. No right or wrong. I’m just different that way.
And yet more broadly, there is something about our culture of booze and marijuana and other things that so many people rely on in order to loosen their inhibitions.
More deeply still, the culture of profit-first is killing the souls of a great many people. To launch a business without the orientation around constantly “growing your business” or making “six-figures” or “scaling” or “living the good life” means there is something wrong with us. Michael Corleone’s famous quote, “It’s not personal Sonny, it’s strictly business” right before he kills two people, or Gordon Gecko’s famous speech when he declared “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” are examples of extreme distortion of a free-market philosophy.
So too with the reduction of “employees” to numbers on a spreadsheet — even less, to mere blips on a computer screen of some faceless financial analyst thousands of miles away who make assertions that lead to the upheaval of thousands of lives.
Or when our culture infuses a notion over and over again that we must hate people who believe differently than us, instead of politely disagreeing or seeking to empathize and understand.
Or more subtly, the debt culture that almost every living human being in the industrialized world lives within that we are always and forever beholden to large impersonal institutions who make decisions about how we live our lives, what kinds of cars we drive, homes we live in, businesses we start, vacations we take, or jobs we qualify for, by the nature of their financial formulae.
The ongoing political soap opera, the obsession with body image, the pressure to conform, the dismissal of the quiet introverted types, the plethora of religions claiming their way is THE way, the faceless pressure to sit in cubicles doing meaningless work, or laboring at physically demanding jobs with little respect for safety, and an education system structured to create an institutionalized mindset in our young ones.
These things and many more are anxiety producing, and the anxiety we feel is not a reflection of some failing in us, but actually our bodies telling us we are trying too hard to conform to a culture and a system that is not healthy for us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Recognition is the first step. We must come to recognize the true nature of our anxiety and sit with it until we are able to accept the true reality of the world in which we exist. This is our awakening, and how we become authentically “woke” in the truest sense. Then, and only then, are we able to take action and make the necessary changes in our lives, communities, and the culture at large.
For a related post we published on our Infinite Whispers blog about a year ago read Follow the Light: How to Receive the Guidance We Seek.
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So true...
Spent much of my life trying to fit into one box or another. At times, still do it, but recognize my thinking, feelings, body response and behavior. It's a process.
I love the wild kids they think out of the box, are willing to take a chance and it is a national crime they are not appreciated. We need schools that teach meditation not teach to the test.
I also spent 6 months in Unalaska where I was not in a car that went faster than 35 MPH. When I got back to the "real" world in a cab zipping in and out of traffic I do understand a bit of anxiety but world wide people must live in the big cities for work, education and housing. So many have not known anything else and I am always sad thinking how many kids have never seen the Milky Way. Media with if it bleeds it leads is making money off of creating anxiety creating "news".