It’s probably fair to say that we find ourselves in the middle of an anxiety epidemic at the moment. Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal had an article entitled ‘The Booming Business of American Anxiety’. The key stat was that according to a recent survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics, 27% of respondents indicated that they had symptoms of an anxiety disorder. This was up from 8% in 2019.
Between then and now of course, we’ve had Covid, the cost of living crisis and the simmering potential of nuclear war in the background.
Yet while these things no doubt have led to an increase in anxiety, people have been talking about an anxiety epidemic long before Covid. A book entitled The Anxiety Epidemic’was published in 2018 – that’s two years before Covid. In fact, an earlier book called The Anxiety Epidemic was published in 1986. A 2008 article in the Independent was entitled: ‘The anxiety epidemic: Why are children so unhappy?’ In America, a 2012 headline in the Atlantic magazine talked about a ‘National Anxiety Epidemic’. In 2016, the Observer proclaimed: ‘Only fundamental social change can defeat the anxiety epidemic’.
So while we can certainly point to potentially-anxiety increasing events over the past few years, commentators have been talking about an anxiety epidemic for quite a while.
Anxiety itself of course is nothing new. We could go back 3,000 years to an ancient Hebrew song which warns against ‘eating the bread of anxious toil’. That song is in the Bible, and we know it today as Psalm 127. We could go back to an ancient proverb, from around the same time, which is also recorded in the Bible: ‘Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad’. We could go back 2,000 years ago to Jesus, telling people not to be anxious about tomorrow. We could go to the Apostle Paul, who says: ‘Do not be anxious about anything’ – and yet who also talks about feeling the daily pressure of his anxiety for all the churches.
I’m sure we all know what it’s like to feel anxious before a big event like an exam, a job interview and so on. That anxiety is a normal part of life. But there is also a crippling kind of anxiety which can lead to us lying awake night after night, and which in certain cases can almost stop us functioning.
It’s this second kind of anxiety that has been increasing in our society in recent years. So what is the cause?
One explanation comes from German sociology professor Hartmut Rosa, who wrote a book in 2020 entitled The Uncontrollability of the World. In it, he diagnoses one of the big problems making us anxious, and suggests a cure. His diagnosis is that we are seeking to make the world controllable. The problem, in his eyes, is that we ‘tend to encounter the world as a series of objects that we have to conquer, master or exploit’. When we encounter situations we can’t control, it leads to frustration, anger and despair. What he says we must do instead is be ‘open to that which extends beyond our control’. In other words, to accept and even embrace the fact that we aren’t in control. And then we won’t feel so anxious.
As a Christian, I think his diagnosis is so close to the truth. He’s right that we become anxious when we feel like we’re not in control. Even his cure gets us halfway there: we need to embrace the fact that we aren’t in control. But Christianity offers a better answer than saying that the world is out of control, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Rather, it tells us that while we are not in control of the world, there is a wise and loving God who is. And that’s good news!
Rather than relieving our anxiety, realising that we can’t control what happens around us will make it worse – unless we come to trust that there is a God who knows what he’s doing.
Given that anxiety seems to be everywhere today, it’s one of the topics that we’re going to be considering in a series of four special meetings we’re hosting in church, beginning this evening at 7pm. The other talks (on Friday, as well as Sunday morning and evening) will deal with Shame, Hope and Change. It would be great to see you there!
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 31st August 2023
(The talk referred to can be listed to here)