A cure for anxiety will not be found in a pill, that's merely an ongoing treatment option.
A cure for anxiety will take a change in society. A Political solution that encourages community, inclusiveness, and towns/cities that aren't broken by design.
This comment in itself is likely to cause anxiety.
"Your mental health issues cannot be solved by anything short of a societal shift."
I agree that there's a lot of things we could change as a society to meaningfully improve mental health but that takes time and people need assistance now. Personally, I've temporarily relocated to Barcelona for my mental health and physical health because being able to walk anywhere without needing to fight cars is an incredible gift to me - the lower barrier helps me walk longer and more frequently. I wish more of the world was like this - but it'll take a while to accomplish that.
surely it’s healthier to be aware that anxiety largely doesn’t come from within, but from the enclosure of the zoo that most of us live in. the alternative is to think it’s your fault
anxiety does come from within tho. It is caused as a consequence of contact with the world we live in, but the external world does not cause anxiety in itself, it's a response and it can be diminished with practice
This is such a silly thing to say tbh. The only non anxious people I’ve seen IRL are effectively idiots so you might be right.
Anxiety is a valid emotion that’s trying to warn you that your surrounding is not good. If anxiety is happening at the scale we’re seeing in the world, then calling it an individual problem is outright wrong.
Anyway, my point is, “I’m a victim” isn’t a reinforcement to anxiety. It’s an understanding that what you’re feeling is a valid emotion and to work around it rather than try to actively combat it on an individual level.
> Anxiety is a valid emotion that’s trying to warn you that your surrounding is not good. If anxiety is happening at the scale we’re seeing in the world, then calling it an individual problem is outright wrong.
This is a byproduct of mass/social media exploiting that mechanic in individuals to keep people tuned in. Fear, obligation or guilt gets to 99% of people. Let's talk about Fear.
Everyone I know with anxiety issues is terminally-online or, before the internet, tuned in to the news every waking minute of their day. They are hyper-aware of the dangers of the world and are always in a falsely-heightened state of arousal.
It makes the world feel smaller and more dangerous than it actually is. It sucks that people are dying in Ukraine. But you don't live there, and have probably never even met a native Ukie. We aren't supposed to react to danger on the other side of the planet. But we're exposed to it and more nonetheless while powerless to do anything about it. It's reinforcing helplessness.
No animal can function this way. It would eventually become so skittish and paranoid it will start making mistakes, and run directly into the crocodile pit while trying to escape a yapping poodle.
The ignorant aren't immune to anxiety because they're retarded; they're tending to the lot in life they do have control over and reacting to dangers that directly threaten them.
The worst self-induced anxiety offenders are the ones who seek out other peoples' conflicts to involve themselves in.
As someone with anxiety, I don’t think the interpretation/conclusion is necessarily that “I’m a victim.” For me, it’s more the realization that I’m having a reasonable reaction to my surroundings and circumstances, meaning the problem isn’t “I’m broken” but rather, “These thoughts/patterns/habits are sub-optimal and unhelpful.” It was a great weight off of my shoulders to see that the problem wasn’t me, myself, alone. That realization helped me find the right things to work on and change to improve my personal experience of reality (a work in progress) and to hopefully also improve reality for others.
But the comment is useful along with yours. I'm currently hanging out with a friend in the burbs and I don't think I could make it out here.
It's cool that your relocation helped, I totally get the city routine helping people like us, walking, real food, pretty stuff to look at, culture, all in fingers reach, consider ourselves lucky for the experience of life quality improvement.
you don't resolve anxiety by adding more capacity to endure it (resilience.) Instead you need to address the root causes— most often maladaptive strategies learned in childhood that need to be relearned and corrected, and then once you are no longer creating the negative emotional material because you're living in a better way, you generally need to support healing/recovery from holding the anxiety however long you did. This often involves recreating or revising relationships with close loved ones.
adding more capacity to tolerate almost always makes things worse in the long run. you don't need a bigger tank to hold more poison, you need to stop creating or consuming the poison, and then you need to detoxify yourself to get rid of what you've already taken in.
disclaimer: I am a psychotherapist but I am not acting as anyone's therapist by sharing this, which is my opinion.
You're asking the wrong person, you should be asking this question to the guy that claimed "learned resilience" works since he's the one that made the original claim.
I did not ask the learned resilience claimant for evidence, because I take resilience training to be orthodox for the psychological community, and I believe the person I responded to does as well. Information is surprise, and the surprise factor is presumably in the requested evidence supporting the unorthodox position.
I give my own reference below and a quotation from it.
“A meta-analysis found a moderate positive effect of resilience interventions (0.44 (95% CI 0.23 to 0.64) with subgroup analysis suggesting CBT-based, mindfulness and mixed interventions were effective.”
I don’t think it’s controversial to claim that resilience helps both to prevent and to adapt to mental challenges such as anxiety, nor is it controversial to claim that resilience can be learned.
This is not to suggest that resilience is the only option for anxiety, or that it’s the best option in general or any specific case. But I do believe that if we’re discussing the problem of widespread anxiety, learned resilience ought to be part of the discussion. In many ways, it is a more practical (and personally actionable) response to widespread anxiety than waiting for sweeping societal changes which are unlikely to materialize.
For anyone who thinks these claims might be controversial, I’ll cite some leading authorities that most readers will trust not to misrepresent the scientific consensus:
According to the American Psychological Association, “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands…. Psychological research demonstrates that the resources and skills associated with more positive adaptation (i.e., greater resilience) can be cultivated and practiced.”
https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience
Harvard Medical School faculty offer a course specifically on building resilience to manage anxiety and mental health: “If you’ve ever felt stressed, burned out, anxious or sad, you’re not alone. These moments are challenging and make it difficult to find a way forward. However, you can use science-backed tools to help manage these experiences and the emotions that come along with them.” https://www.harvardonline.harvard.edu/course/building-person...
Some people are genetically more anxious than others and that anxiety can be treated medically to optimize their wellbeing. Societal issues don’t help but more often than not it’s a misattribution made in the absence of better information, e.g. broadly available genome sequencing is pretty new and findings there take a while to percolate, plenty of genes are now strongly linked to anxiety disorders.
In my view a genetic pre-disposition is necessary but not sufficient and that even a mild trigger is required, but it’s life and no-one is so sheltered that they’re able to avoid all possible triggers.
I was thinking more along the lines of drug abuse or addiction, PTSD, invasive surgery or pregnancy with regards to solely developmental anxiety disorders. There is likely always a genetic element though but some of them are better viewed through a developmental lens.
We disagree on that, I think the focus on developmental is on the assumption that it's easier to do something about the environment than to reliably treat medically, this is only true because doctors etc. know so little about how to treat it medically. Which in my view is not a good enough reason. I hold the opinion that there are effective ways to treat anxiety medically (Low Dose Naltrexone as an example that works for some) and if those were better known then medical interventions would be more effective.
I have a lot of sympathy but the case is not helped by oversimplifying in the opposite direction.
I loosely agree, in the sense that the current common view is too focused on making the individual bear their own cross. But in a literal sense you are wrong, in that there are many who are helped by pills.
Sounds like you're talking about standard run-of-the-mill anxiety. There also exist a variety of chronic anxiety disorders for which people gain substantial benefit from a variety of treatments. This includes what you mention of course, but people benefit from medication as well (and not necessarily narcotics).
I fully agree with this, fwiw. There are a lot of causes and reasons to be anxious that we could try to fix on a broader level, but we do not. Then again, passing off your problems on a “broken world” doesn’t really bring you solace unless you’re interested in theodicy: most people aren’t.
> childhood trauma, broken families, pathogens, and metabolic disorders
These are all downstream from the points mentioned.
> Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. (Carol Hanisch, 1970)
That would imply a unidirectional flow of influence from society to communities to families to the individual. But those ecosystems really communicate with feedback loops, and not strictly downstream. Improve one, you‘ll likely improve the others.
If you think strictly unidirectional, you‘ll end up at the Big Bang as the root of all suffering, and what would that achieve?
Well, then you’d become a Buddhist and hopefully that’d help. To be less oblique, the act of abstracting your own personal suffering from “the way things are” can be a good step in isolating exactly what has got you down. I personally know that accepting a mantra like “life is suffering” can help to improve my resilience and get out of the delusion that everything is “happening to me” vs. “happening around me” and that it’s my choice of how to reckon with that and live life to the best I can in spite of it.
I think to accept that life means suffering might take away potential to improve perspective on whether it’s actually suffering I need to accept, or pain I can mitigate. The distinction is crucial and getting it wrong is - IMO - a big contributor to anxiety & depression (they usually coincide from a clinical perspective). It has been shown in rats that they will reproducibly get anxious and depressed when they feel trapped and isolated, and this resolves when their situation improves. So if someone is not being held prison at the moment, it would IMO be beneficial to find out whether there’s a „prison in the head“.
That’s besides the other factors I mentioned - if you look at studies of what substances pathogens in the stomach and microbiome produce, it turns out they can really cause anxiety. My take is that anxiety can be a multifactorial issue and a local minimum that one needs to climb out of actively. Accepting life as suffering might not give the impulse to get the necessary help.
Yes of course there are feedback loops involved—which is why I really disagree with the comment that we should look back to the big bang, over which we have no influence (AFAIK, but which I'm not interested in debating)—and if I thought there weren't, why would I bother problematizing the political economy?
Did you honestly just make this a comment about carless cities? That we can't fight anxiety without having carless cities? Seriously? People really are just completely stuck in echo chamber cults at this point.
"Your mental health issues cannot be solved by anything short of a societal shift."
I agree that there's a lot of things we could change as a society to meaningfully improve mental health but that takes time and people need assistance now. Personally, I've temporarily relocated to Barcelona for my mental health and physical health because being able to walk anywhere without needing to fight cars is an incredible gift to me - the lower barrier helps me walk longer and more frequently. I wish more of the world was like this - but it'll take a while to accomplish that.