How modern life triggers your anxiety
I’ve been thinking about my grandmother’s lifestyle a lot lately. The weather here in Princeton is unusually cold and snowy, and I am staying inside, cooking chili, cleaning, and making the house cozy. My high school-age daughter had some snow days last week, so I didn’t even have to drive her to school for two days! This feels like a little taste of what my grandmother’s homemaker life must have been like.
I loved my grandmother dearly, and it seemed there was no household task she was not an expert at. She made bread and cakes from scratch, ironed the sheets, made dresses for me, and told wonderful stories about growing up on a farm in Wisconsin with her constant playmates, her sisters: Mable, Frieda, Ruby, Edna, and Hazel. They did their chores, played together, rode in buggies, had their braids dunked in inkwells at school, and Mable, the wild one, decided to ride the cow one fine day (unsuccessfully).
My grandmother saw so many changes during her 98 years! She saw the advent of freeways, television, air travel, the civil rights, the women’s rights, and gay rights movements, the space race, the moon landing, and the beginning of the information age. She took it all in stride, and she continued to have strong relationships and moments of joy and, I think, had a general sense of contentment. She never worked outside the house, stayed married to the same man her whole life, took care of her child, and tended to her rose garden.
Of course she lived in a time of restricted employment options and forced conformity to feminine roles, so there was that. Thank goodness my mother and I lived in a time of increasing political and social rights for women. I am happy that my daughter lives in a time of even more opportunities for women (and I hope it lasts).
My life was very different from my grandmother’s. I loved college and working, sped around town in my orange Ford Pinto, and traveled extensively. I worried Grandma. I didn’t get married until I was in graduate school and eventually became an anxiety therapist with a private practice. I remember my life as a young adult as fairly low stress, exciting, and free.
But, if I were a young adult now, I don’t know how I would fare. Anxiety among Americans ages 18-29 is rising every year. Statistics from studies by the American Psychiatric Association and the Longitudinal Study on Mental Health Trends suggest that a marked rise in anxiety is impacting millions across the United States.
When I think about life in my grandmother’s time, I wonder if she had some advantages that we have lost. Maybe some blissful unawareness? At least she was free of the media bombardment that keeps us informed, yes, but often overwhelms us. Grandma was free of the addicting 24-hour news cycle. She didn’t constantly see the beautiful pictures of her neighbor’s trip to Spain or their announcements of how many words their 12-month-old child can say on her Facebook feed.
We are fortunate to have a huge amount of information from news outlets, social media, and continuous reporting and investigation of news around the clock. But it feeds a possibly toxic appetite for immediate updates in our fast-paced world. Don’t get me wrong, I love having all the information I could ever want at my fingertips, but I sometimes wonder if there were things about my grandma’s environment that were a little more supportive of mental stability.
Enough about my grandma, though; let’s get back to my point, which is a discussion of America’s anxiety problem. Since the pandemic, psychologists and academics have been focusing on the rise of anxiety in the US. Important studies at Stanford and Harvard have linked it to several specific factors: social media, information overload, changes in the work environment, and the loneliness epidemic.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Social media can be both a blessing and a curse. At the beginning of the digital revolution, therapists, myself included, focused on how great it was that communication through social media opened up a whole new world of connection for those with agoraphobia, social phobia, and physical disabilities. Little did we know that over time it would evolve into something that could be toxic.
However, research indicates that ubiquitous misleading personal branding, “humble bragging,” and cyberbullying on social media boost anxiety widely by creating feelings of inadequacy, FOMO, and negative self-comparisons. Social media’s tendency to portray an idealized, fantasy version of life makes it hard for many consumers of it to feel satisfied with their own circumstances. Social media consumers suffer from the stress of trying to keep up with its unattainable, unrealistic images of wealth and beauty. Young girls are found to be particularly susceptible to this kind of stress, and it’s shown to negatively affect their feelings of worth and perceptions of themselves. Young men are demoralized by manosphere influencers who call them losers if they don’t have a six-pack and are not millionaires by age 25.
Technology’s constant stream of updates, notifications, and messages is stressful. For news buffs and political junkies, this should be a dream, but it can turn into a nightmare, shaping our daily mood negatively and requiring some of us to go on news and political information detoxes. Information overload, alias data deluge, infoglut, and infocification, is a tension creator. It can produce feelings of confusion and pressure to absorb it all, making it difficult to relax and enjoy daily life.
Being exposed to more information than we can effectively process often leads to anxiety as we struggle to make decisions or focus on tasks, feeling paralyzed by the sheer volume of choices and opinions available. As a result, we may experience increased irritability, fatigue, and a sense of being overwhelmed.
In my grandmother’s early adulthood, news traveled more slowly through radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines, not through Instagram, texts, or emails. She was not subject to information bombardment, which was probably more peaceful for her. But, of course, having a limited information feed was not advantageous in every way; after all, On Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan was in the process of bombing Pearl Harbor, the Associated Press was unable to get out the urgent news of the attack because the military had taken control of all communication lines and the media had no connection with the outside world. That would not happen today—there would be video sharing on all platforms.
WORK HAS CHANGED
For most of the 20th century, especially post-WWII, there was a particular, mutually beneficial pact between employers and employees. Employees were loyal and usually spent years or entire careers at one company. In exchange, they received job stability, regular paychecks, and pensions.
Over the last 15 or 20 years, however, the employer-employee relationship has undergone a major shift. Increasingly, employers view employees as short-term assets rather than long-term investments, and they focus more and more on shareholder value rather than employee satisfaction. In keeping with this paradigm shift, companies have reduced workers’ benefits and increased layoffs. This redefinition of employees as commodities has resulted in increased workplace demands. In addition, technology, which promised workers more freedom by allowing them to work from home, has, counterintuitively, eroded the boundary between work and personal life, blurring the line and even leading to longer working hours for some.
Employees report that they are experiencing more anxiety and burnout at work, and as they face more corporate restructuring, layoffs, economic uncertainty, and increased workloads, their stress increases. Additionally, many report feeling undervalued and unrecognized for their hard work and complain that it is increasingly difficult to achieve a work-life balance. Was it better for my grandmother to be isolated from the work world by the social milieu of her time? I don’t think so. I value my freedom to be independent and earn my own money, but even now, attitudes that undervalue women persist or are re-emerging, and systems are still in place that require invisible and emotional labor by women. With all our progress, women still experience workplace burnout at a higher rate than men.
THE LONELINESS EPIDEMIC
In 2023, the then Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, published an advisory asserting America’s epidemic of loneliness is “a major public health risk for both individuals and society in the US.” Following this statement, the Harvard Graduate School of Education embarked on a 4-year project dedicated to investigating the increase in loneliness in America. The survey portion of the department’s “Making Care Common” project asked recipients, “What are some of the leading causes of loneliness in America?” To summarize, the sample identified the forces driving the country’s feelings of loneliness as technology (73%), not enough time with family (66%), overwork and fatigue (62%), relationships that were harmed by mental health challenges (60%), and individualistic American culture (58%). Lack of religious or spiritual life and too much time spent focusing on their own feelings and the changing nature of work, i.e., more remote and hybrid schedules, were the perceived causes of loneliness stated by approximately 50% of the people surveyed.
Factors like those highlighted in the survey keep us apart and threaten our mental equilibrium. Humans are hardwired for social connection. As Matthew Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience, puts it, “Being socially connected is our brain’s lifelong passion… It’s been baked into our operating system for tens of millions of years.” Being ostracized from the village threatened the very life of primitive humans. There was safety in numbers, and it was easier to stay alive in a village where labor could be pooled, food and shelter could be shared, and protection could be offered. Outside the village, a lone individual lost access to the benefits of group hunting and gathering, the group’s protection against predators and tribal enemies, potential mates, and group support for raising children. In addition, an ostracized person would miss out on the benefits of the passing down of cultural knowledge and survival skills, as well as any innovations that the collective creativity of group living might provide. Vestiges of this fear of being isolated and unsafe still live on in the human brain.
I am probably falling for some nostalgic narratives. I have heard that American society in the early 20th century was a place of only strong community ties, better social connections, close-knit neighborhoods, and frequent social gatherings among neighbors and in religious groups. And also some bleak appraisals of modern life that argue we have succumbed to toxic individualism and have all but eliminated real, face-to-face conversations, communicating only through texts and social networks.
Both of these versions probably have some truth to them. Of course, in my grandmother’s time, social gatherings and close-knit neighborhoods were mostly segregated by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and income. Religious affiliation was frequently not the haven some of us sentimentally imagine and could be controlling, ostracizing, and capable of creating painful feelings of shame and fear.
Our generation has made positive strides in destigmatizing the study and treatment of mental health issues. We also seem more aware of the unintended psychological consequences of change, progress, technological advancement, and other factors, and we are seeking remedies for these situations.
As I finish this blog, the snow on the ground has hardened into ice. Temperatures have finally risen to the 30s, and the pipes in the kitchen that were frozen for a week have just thawed. During the snowstorm and its aftermath, I started to think of how much more connected to the real world people (like my grandmother) were in the past. I noticed how much time I actually spend doomscrolling, watching the news, and viewing Facebook. Being forced indoors and slowed down has made me more mindful of how I spend my days, and it seems to have reshaped my worldview. Since my neighbors are in the same boat, we have had several of them over for impromptu get-togethers, and seeing them in person feels really good. I hope this shift in my thinking persists even after the snow melts and the seasons change.
