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 in 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.
Anxiety, at its core, is part of a physiological stress reaction to the perception of danger. A stress reaction can be triggered in your body just from thinking about a hypothetical danger lying in the future. However, the stress reaction is usually pre-cognitive, meaning that it can be triggered completely subconsciously, sometimes without a clearly recognisable cause. This is because the amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates the states of calm and stress in the nervous system, precedes the development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is capable of rational thought. From an evolutionary perspective, the pre-cognitive nature of the stress reaction makes perfect sense - when you sense danger, you don’t mull it over for a while, you just run. After you run from the danger, your stress hormones will lower and your nervous system returns to equilibrium.¹
It has been well documented that life in the modern world is filled with opportunities for the brain to perceive danger, but not enough opportunities to sufficiently resolve this perceived danger, especially in a physical manner. In neoliberal economies, which are predominantly based on informational products and service labour, our tasks are increasingly of a cognitive rather than physical nature.² The culture of individual achievement also makes us internalise the message that if we can’t keep up with the cognitive demands the economy places on us, we will be pushed into the increasingly degrading low wage jobs that already define everyday life in the hyper-exploited periphery countries outside the imperial core. The neoliberal ideal of the always self-improving, self-managing subject introduces this pressure to ‘perform well’ into almost every aspect of life. Thus the number of complex cognitive demands placed on us is extremely high, and the (perceived or actual) consequences of not meeting those demands are severe.³
The typical spiral of anxiety goes something like this: ‘If I don’t get good grades, I won’t get a good job, and if I don’t earn enough money I won’t be able to afford food or rent.’ The perceived threat here is very real, but it’s wrapped in an increasingly complex set of factors that are impossible to resolve by, say, running a mile. The stress reaction can’t be entirely resolved, because there is no immediate physical task we can engage in for our brain to understand that we have confronted and resolved the threat. Rather, the danger is abstract, sits within complicated social-economic systems we have no full control over or understanding of, and cannot be resolved due its long-term, cognitive, complex nature. Over time, this constant informational overload adds up as a giant perceived threat from which there appears to be no escape, no resolving, no control.
Many popular coping strategies for anxiety attempt to rationalise the feeling by making you ‘think your way out of it’. We are encouraged to tell ourselves that our fears are exaggerated and very unlikely to actually happen, that the world isn’t actually so bad and that the news have a negative bias, that if we just tell ourselves everything will be okay, it will be. Sometimes this strategy is helpful, because it is doubtlessly true that doom scrolling will negatively affect your mental health and also make no tangible impact on the world, except make twitter more money. But in a lot of ways, this method is at best reductive and at worst a form of denial.
- It’s reductive: trying to rationalise anxiety does not work because anxiety is a physiological state in the body. You cannot think your way out of anxiety. It seems to me that this approach is very much rooted in mind-body dualism. A lot of proponents of this method will insist that anxiety is ‘just in your head’, intending this to be encouraging because if it is ‘just in your head’, surely you can just think your way out of it. In that sense, it’s a denialist fantasy of control. It denies the intensely physical reality of anxiety, that it is indeed not really a ‘mental’ illness - can an illness that’s just mental make me feel so physically sick that I’m unable to eat? Anyone who has experienced intense anxiety can attest to its extreme physical sensations, from feeling unable to breathe to genuinely passing out.
- It’s a form of denial: talking your way out of your fears cannot account for the possibility that sometimes, your fears can become true. It is true, for example, that if some people fail to conform to the standard of functioning that capitalism requires, and if they also lack a social safety net (or can’t access one or fall through its cracks), they may very realistically become homeless and destitute. We know this because we live alongside the poor and homeless every day, some of us know it from direct experience. Therefore, trying to talk yourself out of your fears by simply telling yourself they’re unlikely to happen, or blown out of proportion, is in some sense untrue. Anxiety is your body’s way of protecting you, making sure you survive. It is looking out for you, if sometimes in rather maladaptive ways. But it is not technically wrong - in fact, being able to dismiss a person’s fears as blown out of proportion might even be a sign of privilege, or a form of denial of the social realities of economic inequality. Telling someone who lives paycheck to paycheck that they shouldn’t be afraid of being unable to pay their rent would be ridiculous, and perhaps even border on gaslighting.
Denying or trying to rationalise anxiety is futile, and may even be harmful. Dealing with the type of widespread, chronic anxiety that characterises neoliberal economies requires a more body-based, trauma-informed approach that helps people regain a sense of autonomy over their own bodies and lives. This approach must be rooted in community care and be inherently anti-capitalist. A huge reason for the anxiety epidemic is the alienation of people into private entities who are individually responsible for their health, and the related exploitation of the working classes and the surplus classes by the owning class. We have to acknowledge widespread anxiety as a socio-economic problem. The fear of poverty is real because poverty is real, and the fear of the consequences that the continual extraction of human and natural resources will have on our world is very, very real.
Anxiety must be recognised as a physiological reaction to a complex range of socio-economic and cultural circumstances that affect our bodies in different ways. These interactions must be identified, described, and understood, so that we can develop body-based, communal strategies to integrate and resolve it. Such strategies often serve multiple functions, they are both a form of community care and anti-capitalist organisation. Mutual aid groups are anti-anxiety strategies and also a form of material redistribution by providing a community safety net. Arts and craft circles can be places to learn new skills, learn to problem-solve by using your hands, and to connect with others to gain a sense of support and safety.
In many ways, all of this is incredibly obvious, nevertheless it took me a long time to really understand it. It’s almost as if we have to relearn how to be human.
The IPC have suggested consciousness raising groups as a tool to recognise, describe, and understand the relationship between our world and our bodies. Describing and understanding is a necessary precondition for combating and resolving, but we must also go beyond that. Being able to face and integrate anxiety into our lives will be important for the overcoming of oppressive structures, and therefore for our survival. We learn not to avoid anxiety, but to live alongside it. This honours the feeling as real and a necessary tool that our bodies use to protect us, but also takes away its paralysing and draining power.
Two things that I find important to avoid when working on resolving and integrating anxiety into our lives:
- It is vital to not moralise anxiety. There is nothing wrong or shameful about struggling with it, nor does it arise from any sort of personal failure to “live up to life’s demands”. Quite the contrary, as we now know, anxiety is our body’s natural way of protecting us. It’s a learned behaviour arising from a highly competitive, isolating society that seeks to extract as much productive potential from us as possible and spits us out once we become too sick to be ‘useful’. Anxiety is best treated as a physiological adaptation to this reality that can sometimes manifest as pathological.
- It is vital to not fall into the trap of “personal responsibility”.4 We have to be careful about what our reason for working on anxiety will be. It should not be for the sake of returning to work and just dealing with everything by yourself in an attempt to become the perfectly functioning self-managing self-marketing neoliberal citizen. The reason should be rooted in a desire for self-determination and communal safety. Facing the fears of this world is hard, and we need to work on allowing and making space for these feelings, but also taking responsibility for them. This means learning to know what you need, how to ask for help, knowing when to push yourself and when to take a step back and rest. It is not an individual task, it is a matter of seeing yourself in connection with everyone and everything else, and honouring your place as a part of this network. In order to fight for a collective better future, we need to heal from trauma. But healing is a communal process, healing takes place in the connections we are able to make with the world.
We know that humans can cope with a lot of adversity, because they have done so in the past. The crucial difference is whether they receive support in the process of healing from trauma. I think a big reason why so many people are struggling to cope with our present reality is the isolation we’re stuck in as a result of the atomising structures of late stage capitalism. So we live in a historical moment that is really difficult to deal with on its own, and on top of it all we are lacking that crucial social support that is vital to facing adversity and healing from trauma. Once we have described and understood this reality, we can work on building and rebuilding the structures of support that can help us in dealing with what is happening and what’s to come.
Notes
1Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score - Mind and Body in the Transformation of Trauma
2Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Soul at Work - From Alienation to Autonomy
3Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality - Neurodiversity and Capitalism
4Mark Neocleous - Resisting Resilience