My chronic anxiety and the price women have to pay today
Four years ago, I was diagnosed with chronic anxiety. I remember the moment very clearly: the kind doctor’s words, my surprised reaction followed by a relieved sense of things suddenly falling into place, coming into focus.
on the one hand I was grateful that I finally had an explanation for the set of symptoms I was experiencing; on the other I felt embarrassed and, if I’m honest, a little bit foolish.
Why am I telling you this? Because researchers at Cambridge university have just published a study — based on 48 different reports from around the world — showing that women (and, in particular, women under 35) are twice as likely to suffer from severe anxiety as men.
reader, I am one of those women (not the ones under 35, worst luck, the other sort). Not depressed, you understand, nothing so serious.
No deep-rooted trauma, no black dog prowling the perimeters of my subconscious.
Just a permanent sense of underlying panic, a multifarious universe of nagging concerns that, periodically, coalesce into a black hole of worry into which I occasionally fall.
Clinical depression can, of course, be devastating and even fatal. But if you imagine it as the mental equivalent of catching flu, chronic anxiety is more like having a cold. Irritating, unpleasant (especially for others) — but not too debilitating. Not completely, anyway.
The reason I sought medical help was because I was experiencing some uncommon physical symptoms. having always been a deep sleeper and a bit of a lazybones, I was finding myself waking early — around 5am — and then being unable to get back to sleep, often because my heart was racing.
I frequently felt unpleasantly dizzy, or nauseous. My muscles ached and I would sometimes get pins and needles in my hands.
More than that, though, my head was a constant whirr. I burst into tears at the oddest of things, and felt overwhelmed by the simplest of tasks. And I was tired, so tired in fact that I used to think it wouldn’t be all that bad if I went to sleep and never woke up again.
I would joke with my friends that I longed for a ‘non-fatal hospitalisation’, just to buy myself a few days of rest. As it happens, my wish came true: I got peritonitis, broke my arm badly and caught pneumonia.
My immune system was on the floor. A textbook case, as it turned out. And, it now seems, one of many.
What’s really fascinating is that this condition affects almost exclusively women in the West — europe or North America. elsewhere in the developing world, it is virtually unheard of.
You would think it would be the opposite. After all, what do women in the West really have to worry about? We suffer no immediate threat to our lives or those of our families; no famine, no pestilence or war, none of the terrible injustices so common in the developing world.
Surely this anxiety is just one of those invented first-world problems, such as running out of avocados or missing out on a place for your child at your chosen school?
Well, yes — and no. As the leader of this study, olivia remes of the Department of Public health and Primary Care, puts it: ‘While in the past women were more likely to stay at home and be responsible for the family, they are now more likely to hold down a job while also bringing up children.’
The trouble is, women also have to look after the family and, increasingly, elderly or disabled relatives. As Ms remes explains, ‘the burden of all these things falls on women’.
In other words, this anxiety — this constant stress that affects three million people in the uK alone — is all of our own making.
Because of the pressure on women to pursue our feminist heritage and get out to work, an intolerable strain is being placed on our psyches and turning out a generation of us who are frantic with worry.
In the under-35s, who feel this pressure even more than my generation did, the problem is especially acute. Is our sanity a fair price to pay for equality? only time will tell.