We're a nation of worrywarts, even in good times. But what causes us so much stress and fear? An expert explains. We don't need a global crisis to be reminded that fear and life in the 21st century seem to go hand in hand.
Whether you're a professional basketball player trying to sink a game-winning jump shot in the closing seconds of a playoff game or a lowly journalist scrambling to meet your deadline, chances are your nerves have gotten the best of you at one point or another. You wouldn't be human if they didn't. In fact, fear recognition and the fight-or-flight reflex embedded in our neurochemistry is part of what has enabled our survival and evolution from chest-pounding primates to iPad-wielding bipeds. As we might guess from the endless stream of television commercials for psychopharmaceuticals, Americans have an especially tough road to hoe in the fight against anxiety. Despite our prosperity, statistics show that we're as susceptible to nervous disorders, if not more so, than any nation in the world.
But why do we respond to specific stressors the way we do? And why do certain individuals demonstrate a steely resolve when they might just as easily buckle under the pressure? More important, what lessons can we extract from these intrepid souls? Blending narrative storytelling with investigative research, Taylor Clark's "Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool" offers a fascinating glimpse into why we worry and helps explain what we talk about when we talk about fear. Clark is the author of "Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture" and he's written for GQ, Slate and Psychology Today. Over the phone, we discussed why traffic jams are so maddening, the plight of the neurotic second baseman and the secret to eradicating your biggest worries (spoiler alert: You can't).
Do catastrophic events like the Japanese earthquake or the situation in Libya tend to affect global levels of anxiety, or are they normally confined to the afflicted country?
It's certainly the case that major catastrophes spark widespread anxiety in the countries where they hit. A great example of this is how incredibly overinflated Americans' fears about terrorism grew after 9/11. In one poll that was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks, respondents said that the average American had a 48 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist plot over the next year. As it turned out, the odds were more like 0 percent. On a global scale, it's a little harder to gauge.
Is the United States more prone to higher levels of anxiety than other nations?
Put simply, we are. Perhaps the most puzzling statistics are the ones that reveal that we're significantly more anxious than countries in the developing world, many of which report only a fraction of the diagnosable cases of anxiety that we do. One of the reasons for this is that the people in many of these third-world nations are more accustomed to dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability. I talk about this a fair amount in the book, but lack of control is really the archenemy of anxiety. It's its biggest trigger.
That explains the disparity in anxiety levels between the United States and the developing world, but why are we more anxious than, say, your average European nation?
It's hard to pinpoint an answer, but I think Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we've been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can't even blame it on the recession. As I was conducting research for the book, psychologists pointed to three basic reasons why our psychic state is deteriorating. The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history. The second major cause is the information overload that we're experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We're all aware of it, but I'm not sure we realize how big an impact it's having on our brains. The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of "feel goodism" -- the idea that we shouldn't ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.
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