I’m not exactly sure when it struck me. Maybe it was when I brushed my teeth this morning and found the bathroom floor littered with bristles. Maybe it was when I bit through my cereal spoon. Maybe it was when I shook my fist at the plastic pink flamingo in my neighbor’s yard.
But at some point this morning, I realized, I feel a little stressed. It’s silly, when you think about it. I have a house. I have a fridge full of food. I review movies for a living, for crying out loud. And yet, despite the fact that I should be as mellow as a three-toed sloth, I can still feel about as tightly wound as the rubber-band ball I occasionally fling at passers-by. And I’m not alone.
Forget baseball. According to Taylor Clark, author of the book Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool, anxiety is America’s real national pasttime. More than 18% of us suffer from some sort of anxiety disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Some psychologists say that the average high schooler is more stressed out than the average mental patient in the 1950s. As Clark writes in slate.com:
According to the 2002 World Mental Health Survey, people in developing-world countries such as Nigeria are up to five times less likely to show clinically significant anxiety levels than Americans, despite having more basic life-necessities to worry about. What's more, when these less-anxious developing-world citizens emigrate to the United States, they tend to get just as anxious as Americans. Something about our particular way of life, then, is making us less calm and composed.
Clark doesn’t lay the blame on America’s collective penchant for reality television (though I know Jersey Shore stresses me out) or caffeinated beverages (I do love my Mountain Dew). Rather, he says we’ve created lives for ourselves that can run against the grain of how we’re built to live.
For one thing, Clark says we’re removing ourselves from the tight communities we’ve historically developed. We find solace in our big-screen televisions and our Angry Birds and thus don’t always develop the living, breathing support system that folks from other societies often enjoy.
But that’s not true! you might be saying to yourself. I text! I Facebook! I talk with more of my friends now than I ever have before! Sure … but Clark says that all this techy communication is a poor substitute for face-to-face communication. “When you’re feeling most dreadful, you don’t run to your Facebook profile for consolation,” he writes; “you run to a flesh-and-blood friend.”
Another factor, Clark believes, is that we’re simply overwhelmed with too much information. “The average Sunday newspaper contains more raw information than people in earlier eras would absorb over the course of a few years,” he writes. And, of course, the Sunday newspaper isn’t near the resource that the Internet is. Moreover, most of the information we get is designed to make us anxious. Clark writes:
If a TV newscast isn't covering a grisly double homicide, the anchor is teasing a story about the hidden threat in your own home. "The media does this to us," explained Evelyn Behar, a worry expert who teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "It's always reporting that this thing causes cancer or that thing can kill you. We live in a culture where fear is used to motivate us."
Finally, Clark says we try to ignore all this anxiety by going shopping.
We avoid situations that make us nervous. We try to bury uncomfortable feelings like anxiety and stress with alcohol or entertainment or shopping sprees. Psychologist Steven Hayes, creator of a highly effective anxiety treatment formula called acceptance and commitment therapy, told me that we've fallen victim to "feel-goodism," the false idea that "bad" feelings ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill. This intolerance toward emotional pain puts us at loggerheads with a basic truth about being human: Sometimes we just feel bad, and there's nothing wrong with that—which is why struggling too hard to control our anxiety and stress only makes things more difficult.
Reading Clark’s story made me feel, well, a little anxious.
But then I put aside the Mountain Dew and gave the matter a little more thought. Beyond the fact that Plugged In has been echoing many of Clark’s points for years, it feels as if the Christian church offers an antidote to some of our national anxiety—if we take our walk of faith seriously enough. If we feel alone, it offers companionship. If we feel harried, it offers peace. If we feel as if we’re forcing smiles all the time, and we simply can’t voice our pain and hurt and anger—the church opens its doors and asks us to share.
Hey, we live in a stressful world, and all the doodads we surround ourselves with can add to, not subtract from, that stress. Christians aren’t immune.
But I know that my faith tells me to stop shaking my fists at plastic flamingos, to re-evaluate my priorities, to embrace the things worth embracing. And through this imperfect walk of faith, I know there can be peace: Not peace as defined by an absence of stress, but a peace that comes from finding a light beyond it.
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