I recently listened to a thought provoking podcast featuring Swedish psychiatrist Anders Hansen. He takes a brain-focused approach to exploring mental health, viewing it through an evolutionary lens. One of his key points is that we, and predominantly young people, often think of the world today as a more perilous place than it truly is.
This skewed perception stems, Hansen says, from a misunderstanding of anxiety that has become prevalent. Instead of recognising anxiety as a feeling that will pass (a verb, ‘I am anxious’), we tend to treat it as a tangible condition, a ‘thing’, a noun: ‘I have anxiety’. Because of this shift in view, we then try to get rid of this ‘thing’ called anxiety as swiftly as possible.