There’s a lot of advice out there about anxiety, especially for young people. Anxious people need to do breathwork. We need to meditate more. Repeat positive affirmations. Almost none of it works.
I think this is because we now use the word anxiety to describe two different things. There’s the anxiety that makes young people scared to answer the phone or order in restaurants. But there’s also a deeper, ambient anxiety I see so many of us wracked with—a sort of neurotic paralysis. Not knowing which path to take in life. Not knowing what decisions to make. Not knowing who we are. It’s this constant second-guessing, examining every decision to death, agonising over the right thing to do. When young people talk about how unbearable their anxiety is, the relentlessness of it, I think this is more what they mean.
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