Age of Anxiety

Age of Anxiety 

Most of us have experienced anxiety in some phase of our lives. It’s perceived as detrimental to our well-being. If we are aware of our anxiety, we can learn to be conscious of our emotions, which can then serve as a guide and teacher.
 Anxiety can be very toxic. Media or daily news disturbs the public with anxiety producing topics (for example, an article titled “Most toxic products found in every home”). Advertisements are crafted in a way that causes anxiety about not looking good enough, or not being up to date on the latest fashion. Even seeing Facebook friends always looking happy and traveling whereas we believe things are so challenging at our end can cause anxiety. There is always a feeling of not having enough. Overloaded and overstimulated we suffer from info media anxiety; so many people I talk to always say that there is too much going on. Life is very busy, more than they can comfortably handle. Too much information to process, too many possibilities to choose from, too much change too fast. Too much stuff in the mail and mall and much too much to do. Yet we love the choices and possibilities. We don’t want to give up on anything, however, in order to handle this age of “too much”, we need to reboot ourselves and relearn the ancient concept of enough. We need to learn to make a conscious choice of simplicity. Taking time to honor our inner life of the soul has always been important but never has been more important than today’s outer non-stop world, and that needs to be changed.
 According to Robert Gerzon, a psychotherapist who specializes in mind/body approaches to anxiety—true serenity may be both necessary and more possible in today’s anxious and stressful age than any other times in the history. The psychotherapist says that most people are more anxious about public speaking then they are about death. We worry about whether our investmentis growing than about whether weare growing. Its not about being anxious but are we anxious about the right thing? It was by solving math problems that we learned math, thus by solving life problems, we learn to live.

Helen Keller, though deaf and blind, was able to see certain things much more clearly than many people blessed with perfect eyesight. In her book, The open Door, she wrote; “security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of man as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.”