Recently I read a Slate article addressing the reasons behind the epidemic of stress and anxiety, particularly in the lives of college students. The author of the article, Taylor Clark, disputes the claims that it is our bad economic times and the dearth of jobs awaiting young adults once they graduate. Instead she offers three reasons of her own for the escalating anxiety in our county, and I am thinking she is onto something.
The first reason she gives is the lack of human contact. With our facebooking and tweeting we may be more linked in but everyone needs a hug now and then. A family friend, Sister Rosalind, is a dynamic woman who started offering massage at the YMCA back in the 1970s when massage was still considered something associated with a red light district. She took a lot of grief for being a nun and massaging half naked men. Many times I heard her telling my mom, “People are starved for touch.” She attributed the healing power of massage more to the physical human contact than the kneading of sore muscles. Sister Rosalind went on to open up several massage schools. Computers don’t hold us when we sob our hearts out. Iphones won’t kiss our cheek. Sometimes it isn’t words we need to connect, it’s a hand to hold.
Clark also attributes the over abundance of information as another anxiety producer. There are too many voices talking at once, too many statistics, warnings, opinions. I heard a guest speaker this past weekend at a church in Florida. I can’t recall the man’s name, but he’d apparently once run for public office, and during his “message” he held up several of the books he’d authored and that were available for purchase following the service. The man spoke for about thirty minutes (I think) and about a quarter of the way through his talk I realized he was using classic hypnotic techniques, the realization coming when I started to feel myself going into a trance state. One of the techniques he used was talking very fast and throwing out a rapid fire of information. He was really a master at it. In that thirty minutes (distortion of time is a marker for being in a trance state) he covered the history and details of about twenty Bible stories and about twenty different historical stories of bad leadership and fallen empires. As the conscious mind was trying to catch up and evaluate the plethora of factoids, he would throw in current political catch words like “community organizer” as a descriptor for one of the less desirable characters in an Old Testament Bible story I’ve actually never heard of before, and I thought I was pretty well versed. It isn’t that I disagree with all that this man said, not at all. It was more the manipulative way he was presenting his political arguments and mixing them with classic religious night terrors. I think it is indicative of much of the information we get now. There is such an overload that our conscious mind can hardly keep up. Mix that with a healthy dose of fear and we can easily be swayed, but our subconscious does keep up and is warning us to think for ourselves using the best tool it has —anxiety.
Lastly, Clark says that we are anxious because we are trying so hard to get to a place of happiness and contentment. When we are feeling angry, resentful, frustrated, and fearful, we judge ourselves harshly as if that is a somehow a failing. I teach a writing class and today one of the students read a beautiful poem entitled, “Sorrow” that spoke lovingly of how healing that emotion can be, though we often resist it. A dear friend of mine told me today of some devastating news she’d just received and seemed more upset that she couldn’t feel anything about it. What if it were okay to be sad or to feel flat if that is more honest? What if we could give up trying so hard to get to “happy” and just accept the times when we feel horrible? What if we could stop beating ourselves up for being less than perfectly cheerful and blissed out all the time and instead gather into the fold of our friends to whine and complain? My truest friends are the ones I feel free to let go of a barrage of swear words knowing they will cheer me on rather than judge me for my humanness.
So next time you want to let go of some stress and anxiety, find someone you care about and ask for hug, maybe sit in silence together, and when your ready, cuss like a sailor.
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