We Are Still Very Anxious
A body-based approach to anxiety under neoliberalism
In 2014, a collective named the Institute for Precarious Consciousness (ICP) wrote an article called We Are All Very Anxious, which became a somewhat seminal piece in leftist-political approaches to the mental health crisis. The ICP argue that anxiety is a predictable effect of neoliberal policies and cultural changes, and that it is the dominant affect of our time. Since then, countless pieces have been published documenting the skyrocketing rates of anxiety disorders and its increasing prevalence as a widespread societal pathology. The ICP also identify anxiety as a major barrier to collective organising against capital, as it commonly leads to people shutting themselves off in an attempt at self-preservation, rather than reaching out towards building collective solutions.
I want to take a bit of a closer look at anxiety as a physiological process, as a material manifestation of how our bodies interact with social structures, cultural ideals, and economic realities. I often hear anxiety described as a somewhat abstract feeling, without exploring the intense physiological sensations of it, and how these can come about from the ways our bodies react to and interact with the messy world of our complex sociocultural systems. Describing anxiety as a feeling makes it seem almost immaterial, even though feelings are always also a physiological state of the body.
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