Can we break the anxiety habit?
Writer and therapist Owen O’Kane believes we have become addicted to feeling anxious. Here, he explains how he learned to manage his fears
Key work events make me anxious. They give me chest pain, a churning stomach and disrupted sleep; my thoughts run through all the mistakes I could make and replay every bad experience in my past. Why put myself through this, I reason, which inevitably means that when, say, a high-stakes meeting is on the horizon, those feelings are worse, more intense, more prolonged. It’s a vicious cycle and one I admit early on when interviewing the anxiety expert Owen O’Kane.
O’Kane doesn’t seem surprised and why should he be? I bet everyone tells him about their anxiety. My dread, avoidance and catastrophising interior monologue are bog-standard these days: research by the Mental Health Foundation in 2023 found that 60% of UK adults reported experiencing “anxiety that interfered with their daily lives in the past two weeks”. We’re anxious about global geopolitics, the climate and the cost of living; our health, jobs, relationships and what strangers think of us. It takes children out of school and adults out of work. It’s an uneasy background thrum everywhere, something I have assumed to be a product of our ill-adapted, threat-seeking brains being constantly confronted with every terrible thing in the world through the shiny rectangles clutched in our sweaty hands (US psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt recently characterised a whole demographic of smartphone natives as “the anxious generation”).
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