The Feminine Urge to Be Systemically Anxious
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is the most powerful form of time travel human beings have at their natural disposal.
It teleports us out of the present - to a mortifying instant from your school days eight years ago or to a future moment where you don’t know how to respond in that important interview next week.
Life and time are inextricably connected, yet completely powerless against one another’s passing. In a world where we, as humans, have taken sovereignty over the majority of the earth’s resources, the one thing we have not yet dominated is time. We move from one present moment to another, often holding on tightly to the stability of a familiar past, hoping it will guide us into a safe future. Or we over-imagine every possible outcome, trying to arm ourselves against disappointment or failure.
I am writing this piece because as I realised just how in love I am with writing - while feeling a euphoria in finding this out - I also felt a tightness in my chest.
How will I make this sustainable? Will it ever be profitable? Will I be ‘successful’ enough to keep doing what I love?
I began scrutinising every possible strategy, considering rushing work that does not want to be rushed. I transformed anxiety into action - ticking off tasks as a way to feel in ‘control’, as a buffer against guilt or overwhelm.
We often force our anxiety to metamorphose into productivity, because if we do our best, then at least the failure won’t be our fault, right?
By controlling ourselves, our output, and our discipline, we believe can evade these anxieties. We can hide from the punishment we are sure to bring upon ourselves if we dare to stop.
An interview with neuroscientist, Dr. Russel Kennedy, articulated something that felt so intuitive to me, I want to share it with you:
The part of the brain called the amygdala, is designed to send alarm signals when we encounter danger - it protects us. Anxiety is that alarm signal. He argued anxiety is often a response to a form of separation we encountered in childhood. This can range from a difficult birth to feeling left out at school or not feeling similar to your parent.
We are social creatures so when we feel separated in any way – emotionally or physically - from our caretakers or our ‘tribes’, the alarm goes off. Even if we cannot recall the original childhood memory, our body and our amygdala can.
It can trigger a fear of feeling lost or unstable – of being separated from ourselves. That feeling might be activated when someone doesn’t communicate as much as we’d like them to, when we’re waiting on an acceptance letter, or even when we’re feeling unwell. It is the sense that the future is no longer secure.
We’re often under the illusion that we just need to change our mindsets, stop thinking that way, or just do something about it instead. But what we need to understand is that anxiety is rooted far deeper than thought, it is a learned habitual response to an ‘injury’ from a long time ago.
It is easier to search for security in the cycle of anxious thought - to live in our minds rather than our bodies. But anxiety doesn’t originate in the mind. It’s bodily. We simply move it to the mind because it feels safer there. And when that becomes a habit, the loop can feel familiar – even comforting.
But what this loop does is it shuts off the love and compassion ‘functions’. A child – or adult – who feels separated does not need a hamster wheel of terrifying thoughts about the future. They need love and compassion. The remedy is to heal that separation wound with the love and compassion that, at some point, the small version of yourself did not feel. This disrupts the cycle of anxiety.
Why is everybody so anxious?
The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy recently found that social anxiety now affects 54% of British people - and 72% of young people aged 16 to 24.
At the same time, those 16–24-year-olds are far more risk averse than previous generations, young people are smoking, drinking and having less sex.
This points to a culture of fear – fear of making mistakes; of feeling out of control; of stepping out of comfort zones or being emotionally vulnerable.
Like every other generation, we are the product of our environment, we are a generation raised in the context of:
- Late-stage capitalism
- The War on Terror
- The climate crisis
- Covid-19
- The cost-of-living crisis.
We are the generation growing up with the most at our fingertips - from having AI write our coursework to more freedom in how we express and define our identities.
And yet, we are also a generation with less available to us to build a secure future. An analysis carried out in the US showed that Gen Z has 86% less buying power than Baby Boomers did at the same age.
And we are raised in a world that glorifies the individual more than ever before. One obsessed with success. We are expected to elevate the economy while solving the climate crisis. Of course there is anxiety. Of course, there is pressure when what we need is collaboration and cooperation, but we are taught to focus on our individual success to the point that we do not even have the time or energy to focus on the community as much as we might like to.
Zygmunt Bauman, the renowned author of Liquid Modernity, wrote that the recent past – the world of our parents and grandparents – was made up of more solid structures, beliefs and identities. Today, everything is more liquid. We can move through jobs, cities, and relationships far more freely. And while that freedom is powerful – and absolutely necessary – it comes with a cost.
The generations before us fought to reach this point, challenging oppressive systems, pushed for more freedom, more choice. And for many of us, that has opened doors. So why, then, is there still suffering? Why are we more anxious now, with more freedom than ever?
Clinical psychologist, Marco De Colle, suggests that humans need stable structures and commitment to function well. With the focus being more hyper-individual, parenting has become child-centred to an extreme in the Western world, where parents are shamed for not doing everything possible to maximise their child’s ‘success’, the child’s demands can even rule the family.
As a result, children grow up without enough external structure (focus on other people) and are forced to build rigid internal ones – which they then battle against.
It can create hyper-independence and the pressure to succeed can become binary, either total success or total failure.
Furthermore, in a ‘liquid’ world, very little holds value for long. A body type, a fashion trend, a technology – it’s all changing. If only what’s new holds value, how do you stay rooted? How do you commit to anything? We begin to doubt our choices, question our direction, worry that committing to one path means renouncing all the others. It becomes exhausting to simply live.
Perhaps this helps explain why there’s been a rise of right-wing ideology within our generation. The BBC reported on a study showing that individuals who spent more time looking at threatening images (e.g. car crashes, violence) were more likely to identify as politically conservative. And it makes sense: when we feel surrounded by threat, we’re more likely to be drawn to protectionist politics and policy offered by right-wing parties.
In a world that feels increasingly unstable - with the cost-of-living crisis, the climate crisis and the constant pressure to ‘upgrade’ or reinvent ourselves – it is no surprise that right-wing politics has been able to gain traction through this fear and uncertainty.
Living in the Present, not in Fear
But when we build our lives, or our societies, around fear – when our worldview is shaped by defending against the ‘other’, the ‘unknown’, or the ‘unpredictable’ – we don’t soothe anxiety, we reinforce it.
If our societal structure is based on us vs. them and now vs. later, then all we’re doing is locking ourselves into a permanent state of emotional tension.
Yes, humans need structure. But while we don’t yet have a stable global model for it, we can start by reconnecting with the structure of our own lives.
Because when a person feels separated - from themselves, their context, or their identity – it’s easy to become overwhelmed by anxiety. Knowing our own history – not just our personal story, but our community, our culture – can give us structure. It can provide an anchor in the past, even as the future feels uncertain.
And even more importantly, we can begin to choose presence. To stop spinning through the imagined versions of ourselves and the lives, the days or the hours we could have had. To stop scanning for where the grass might be greener.
Instead, we can decide to be here – in our bodies, in the moment – not as a rejection of aspiration, but as an act of commitment to it. To renounce the millions of ideals we are sold on the internet to be able to choose our own values. Our relationships. Our actual, present lives.
To end, I recently finished Near To The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, and one of the last lines stayed with me:
‘There will no space in me to even realise that I will be creating instant by instant, not instant by instant: always welded, because then I will live, only then will I live bigger than my childhood.’
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20221013-why-gen-z-are-right-to-be-worried-about-money
https://www.businessinsider.com/generation-z-sex-alcohol-driving-study-2017-9
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160928-how-anxiety-warps-your-perception
https://ipitia.com/liquid-modernity-and-its-role-in-neurosis/