There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Zora Neale Hurston,
author of Dust Tracks on a Road
You won’t find the term emotional inflammation in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the standard guide for the classification of mental health disorders. But it’s a condition afflicting millions of women and men who are currently living in our noisy, chaotic, confusing, and often contentious world. The symptoms can include a maelstrom of anticipatory anxiety, nameless dread, an ongoing state of high alert, or new levels of hyperreactivity, agitation, or hypervigilance. Others experience post-traumatic or even what I have dubbed pre-traumatic stress symptoms.
It may come as no surprise that research suggests that soldiers facing deployment into combat situations often experience repeated disturbing thoughts, images, or dreams of traumatic experiences that could occur or have strong physical reactions when reminded of the possibility of such an event in the future. Perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise, either, to learn that individuals who are working on the front lines to prevent human rights abuses and racial injustices or battling the climate crisis have similar symptoms. But ordinary citizens can suffer symptoms like this too. They are increasingly asking their doctors for medications to help control symptoms that stem from the current, anticipated, and feared crises and disasters around us or to focus their scattered attention or help them sleep.
Basically, we’re looking for ways to make the pervasive sense of This sucks! go away. For the more fortunate among us, the stream of apocalyptic messages comes through newsfeeds; however, we don’t always have time to recover from one alarming piece of news before another follows. For some of us, it isn’t just that these crises are in the news, but also that we’re personally affected by climate issues, racial discrimination, sexual misconduct, and other social injustices. We are living in a world where bizarre is the new normal, where the unexpected has practically come to be expected. Disturbing political, environmental, and societal events—like the metaphorical version of Chicken Little’s frantic warning, “The sky is falling!”—are playing, for many of us, in a repetitive loop in our minds.
Distrust in our institutions is rising as confidence in our leaders declines. The income gap continues to widen, and the economic vibrancy of the middle class, long the backbone of our economic system, is breaking down. Despite all the outrage and indescribable sorrow, mass shootings continue, and hate crimes, mistreatment of immigrants, nuclear missile testing, sexual misconduct scandals, and environmental threats—from the use of toxic chemicals and contaminants—are widespread and ongoing. As the planet continues to unravel from the increasingly frequent and intense impacts of the climate crisis, questions about the future of the human race are being asked. It’s not surprising that millions of people are fearful about the state of the world and even the future of the human race. People want to know, What the heck is going on?! How can I get rid of the sense of foreboding and this feeling of powerlessness? How can I protect myself and those I love?
Compounding the problem, we have strayed from the natural conditions that are aligned with how we, as human beings, have evolved to live. Our internal body clocks (our circadian rhythms) have been thrown off course. Technology has stolen our hearts and captured our imaginations, and we are treating the natural world that nurtured us like a rejected ex. As we become increasingly disconnected from nature and oblivious to the many restorative benefits of living in harmony with it, our physical and emotional energy may be depleted, or we may stay revved in a state of high alert in case we need to fight or flee from danger. Meanwhile, this ever-present anxiety in our minds is like a dark and menacing black pool that has become the dumping ground for every new worry and fear that arises.
By way of example, consider forty-two-year-old Lauren, a high-achieving policymaker who on the surface seemed to be leading a charmed life. When she came to see me, her career was thriving, she was earning an impressive salary, and she was highly valued both at work and on the Washington, DC, social circuit. But inside, Lauren, who is smart, accomplished, charismatic, and attractive, was falling apart. She struggled with emotional lability, rapidly shifting moods that compromised her ability to do her work. The disturbing content of much of the news she tuned in to made her feel constantly on edge. She had a pattern of choosing emotionally distant boyfriends and erupting in bouts of neediness and anger that she’d later regret. Unable to comfort herself, Lauren would often end up eating or drinking too much or, worse, snorting a line or two of cocaine to escape from her distress. After a weekend of particularly troubling excesses, she decided she’d had enough and wanted to stop her destructive patterns. That’s when she came in for help.
As we worked together, it became clear that the demands of Lauren’s work and the pool of bad news she was swimming in (about political dysfunction, human rights violations, disasters, and ongoing threats related to the climate crisis) were making her feel like the world was going to pieces. What’s more, it was driving her own sense of being out of control, which was intensified by memories of the chaotic atmosphere in which she had grown up. With regular therapy to uncover what was going on and a stint on medication to calm her symptoms, Lauren got control of her emotions and made some changes that were right for her newfound desire for stability and authenticity.
What about the rest of us? There’s just no way around it; we’re living in anxious times: “Collectively, the world is more stressed, worried, sad and in pain today than we’ve ever seen it,” concluded the Gallup 2018 Global Emotions Report, which was based on 154,000 interviews with adults in 146 countries. The 2019 Global Emotions Report did not provide better news. Around the world, worry and sadness, already at record highs, edged up even further, and anger increased even more. Meanwhile, according to the 2018 Looking Further with Ford Trends Report, 70 percent of adults in the US say they feel overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world today, and 50 percent of adults throughout the world say that following the daily news is stressful.
“Deaths of despair”—from suicide and those linked to alcohol and drugs—are on the rise. From 1999 to 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates in the US increased by more than 25 percent, and 54 percent of those who died from suicide had not been diagnosed with a mental health condition. It’s not just adults who are affected. From 1999 to 2014, suicide rates among kids and teens between the ages of ten and nineteen increased 33 percent, and the latest data, from 2019, indicates that the gender gap in suicide is narrowing because more girls and young women are committing suicide than in the past, with the largest percentage increase in those aged ten to fourteen years.
The number of people diagnosed with major depression in the US increased by 33 percent from 2013 to 2018—and even more among young adults (an increase of 47 percent) and teens (a 47 percent jump for boys, and a 65 percent spike for girls). The percentage of high school students who had experienced periods of persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year increased significantly from 2007 to 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. (For the record, “persistent” in this survey was defined as almost every day for at least two consecutive weeks and sufficiently severe that the student stopped engaging in some of his or her usual activities.) Nearly one-third of the students surveyed experienced these persistent feelings of despair in 2017!
Given these statistics, who would doubt that we are experiencing a rising state of emotional inflammation? Emotional inflammation takes a toll on your body, mind, and spirit in just about every conceivable way. For one thing, living in a continuous state of high anxiety causes your body’s fight-or-flight response to basically get stuck in the “on” position: Your sympathetic nervous system stays revved up, releasing a flood of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. Both of these stress hormones increase your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, straining your cardiovascular system, as well as your immune, endocrine, and neurological systems. These changes can amp up your pain response and—pay attention, here!—decrease fertility. Collectively, these physiological challenges contribute to allostatic load, a form of stress-induced wear and tear on the brain and body resulting from exposure to chronically or repeatedly elevated stress hormone levels, an effect that accelerates the aging process.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. Feeling unsafe, hypervigilant, hyperreactive, and/or fearful about the future can lead to sleep troubles and changes in your behavior (with eating, drinking alcohol, or smoking). It can lead to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, impotent rage, and despair. It can compromise your ability to function at your cognitive best by impairing your focus, as well as your ability to learn and remember new information. Anticipatory anxiety can hijack critical—and fragile—decision-making faculties by disrupting normal neural processes in your brain—reducing activity in the areas that play a role in the processing of risk and fear and areas involved in processing reward. These changes can alter how you make decisions by shifting the way you evaluate potential positive consequences and anticipated negative consequences of your options so that a greater emphasis is placed on the negative. Moreover, when we feel that we have lost our grounding or sense of stability, we can feel a sense of emptiness or feel adrift; or, we may feel alienated from ourselves or from others. Any of these sensations may lead to what feels like a spiritual crisis.
Any way you slice it, pervasive anxiety is a crippling way to live and work; it robs us not only of our well-being and quality of life but our ability to function. Some people try to get away from these uncomfortable feelings, distracting themselves by running from them, pushing themselves, consciously or not, to go faster, to cram their lives with more activities or more stimulation. Other people shut down or withdraw, while still others feel perpetually on edge or irritable.
As uncomfortable as these feelings are, it’s essential to recognize their importance to us. They allow us, as a species, to evolve and survive, adapt, be resourceful, and creatively solve challenges. And they make us who we are as humans with the capacity for compassion, which is the foundation for empathy and altruism. Our feelings also drive our values. Caring deeply is a good thing, a source of strength and guidance; however, when it’s untempered, the capacity to feel intensely can set you up to be triggered with emotions that can spin out of control. The upside is that embedded in these emotions is an enormous amount of energy—it’s up to each of us to figure out how to harness and direct it toward effecting changes for the better. Once you understand and examine your feelings, you can grow; become more resilient, even courageous; address blind spots (things you haven’t been able to see) in your life; and improve the ways in which you interact with other people. Try to look at this as an opportunity, rather than only a crisis.
Human beings have a tremendous capacity to rebound from hardship, to grow and learn from their experiences. Though it’s a controversial concept in my field, post-traumatic growth can occur when people experience beneficial psychological, emotional, or social changes in the aftermath of a severe illness or injury, the death of a loved one, a natural disaster, or some other form of adversity. In a study of 3,157 US veterans, 50 percent reported at least moderate post-traumatic growth after their most traumatic event, and 72 percent of veterans who had previously screened positive for PTSD experienced some post-traumatic growth.
Many of us are worrying about the crisis or catastrophe that could strike today or tomorrow—and the fear is both top of mind and deep in our hearts. As survey after survey has shown, stress, worry, and anger have intensified in recent years. In 2017, a survey of 1,019 adults throughout the US, on behalf of the American Psychiatric Association, found that nearly two-thirds indicated that they were “extremely” or “somewhat” anxious about keeping themselves and their loved ones safe and healthy and more than 50 percent were extremely or somewhat anxious about their finances or the impact of politics on their daily lives. In 2018, the American Psychiatric Association repeated the survey and found that 39 percent of respondents said they were more anxious than the previous year, particularly about their safety, health, finances, relationships, and the impact of politics on their daily lives.
Along with the dramatic increase in anxiety, the hierarchy of triggers for our collective case of emotional inflammation often reflects what’s happening in the news. It can feel as though we’re living in a horror-house hall of mirrors, where waves and spikes of disturbing, sometimes distorted, news assault us often out of nowhere. Fake news has permeated the culture, and worse, so has deep fake video, which is even more skewed and misleading; both are driving conspiracy theories that foster mistrust of each other as well as additional unease about who or what we can rely on for the truth. It is a time of moral vertigo, where the lists of disgraced former heroes, idols, and role models grow longer on a near-daily basis. Powerful, once-admired people in entertainment, politics, the media, the arts, and other influential domains have been taken down by accusations of sexual harassment, misconduct, or assault. Hearing that privilege allows some individuals to buy or bribe their kids’ way into prestigious colleges and universities adds another layer to our collective outrage. Sometimes it feels like the world is undergoing an ethical free fall and we are experiencing drama overload.
Alexandra, a fifty-two-year-old writer in New York City, had always been somewhat anxious, but her anxiety stayed below the surface until she had kids. After a difficult divorce in 2010, her anxiety ramped up a bit more as she realized she’d been in a psychologically abusive marriage. It increased again in 2015 as she supported one of her twins, born female, as he transitioned to male. Then things really came to a head during the presidential election in 2016. Alexandra, who had been sexually assaulted when she was fourteen, said, “Seeing the way women were being treated across all aspects of life, and seeing the vitriol and abuse writ large on the news, was devastating to me. The public cruelty to women woke up all the trauma of what I’d been through.” Besides feeling constantly on edge, she became hypervigilant: “I felt like if I took my eye off the ball for even five seconds, something worse would happen,” she recalled.
When she began experiencing worrisome brain glitches, during which she’d have nonsensical thoughts or forget a point she was trying to make, she became truly alarmed. “It scared the crap out of me,” she said. “The more scared I got, the more anxious I became and the worse I felt.” In 2017, she was diagnosed with PTSD, brought on by an enormous amount of personal stress, as well as by the current political and social climate. In addition to going to therapy and increasing her antidepressant dosage, she now carries Ativan with her in case she feels on the verge of a panic attack.
Many of the issues that are contributing to our emotional inflammation are outside of our control. A 2019 Gallup poll, based on interviews with a random sample of 1,039 adults throughout the US, found that the top ten issues they worry about a great deal are as follows:
The biggest concern among young people, ages thirteen to twenty-four, is gun violence in schools and elsewhere, with 53 percent of those under eighteen saying it’s a major worry for them, according to a March 2018 poll by USA Today. How many of these do you relate to?
With potential threats and concerns coming from multiple directions, often simultaneously, to many of us the world can feel like we are living in a house with both a faulty foundation and a leaky roof. Though the threats mount, some by the hour, those in a position to protect the public from these vulnerabilities are preoccupied with squabbling and looking out for their own (political) futures. The people who should be taking care of the proverbial house are behaving badly and shirking responsibility for cleaning up the messes that they or others created. Is it any wonder we don’t feel safe?
The majority of adults in the US feel that we are living at the lowest point in US history, and the future of our nation is a significant source of stress, primarily because of the current political climate, the social divisiveness our country is experiencing, and concerns about health care and economic security, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2017 Stress in America report. In a 2018 survey of adults in the US, researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 69 percent are “somewhat worried” about global warming and 29 percent are “very worried”—the highest levels since the survey began in 2008.
Rebecca, a sixty-one-year-old science policy analyst, has been working on climate and environmental issues for most of her career. Over time, she has learned how to manage her anxiety about climate change so that it’s in the background for the most part. “It’s kind of like having a family member who’s slowly dying of cancer—you just have to accept it after a while and keep going,” she says. These days, what really triggers her emotional inflammation and makes her feel angry, frustrated, and demoralized—especially since she has a son in his twenties—are news reports of high-placed elected officials who blatantly disregard the environmental legacy that’s being passed on to future generations. “The ship is in very bad hands,” she says, “and it’s going to be a mean, ugly world because of all the stress multipliers we’re creating for ourselves—climate instability, polluted water, food shortages, and vector-borne diseases.”
Climate change is an existential threat to all of us, but the threat is particularly menacing for young people who will be at the center of the storm, literally, when conditions become more violent, the harm accumulates, and the inevitability of the destruction becomes more apparent. Many young people know well that they are in harm’s way. Some say they will not have children because of the anticipated climate chaos and especially because of the carbon costs of putting another person on the planet. It should go without saying that at their age, they shouldn’t even have to think about these issues. But they do.
As difficult as it is to hear all the bad news about what’s happening in the world, we should recognize that we have some control over what’s triggering our emotional inflammation and that in some instances we’ve brought on the problems ourselves. Collectively, as human beings, we’re essentially soiling our nests (our planet) by polluting our air, water, and land with the ever-increasing array of chemicals, toxins, metals, and other contaminants. We’re exerting a perilously heavy carbon footprint with the mounting toll of emissions of greenhouse gases. The good news is that because we are causing many of the problems, we have the power to correct them. More of us need to do our part to make matters better.
Meanwhile, some of the factors contributing to our personal emotional inflammation are directly and individually within our control. Many of us are living in ways that are out of sync with our internal body clocks (the all-important circadian rhythms). Even though many people don’t realize it, the master timekeepers inside us are thrown off by exposure to bright indoor light at times when the body expects and would benefit from darkness. We’re spending so much time with technological devices that it is leading to a loss of downtime as well as musing time. As we increasingly use our bodies to function in ways that are inconsistent with their intended design, they are experiencing unnatural wear and tear, including chronic cases of social jet lag: a syndrome defined as a conflict between what our bodies need, based on our internal biological clocks, and what our lives require, based on our jobs, our family lives, and other factors. Social jet lag is more than just an annoyance or an inconvenience; it also can compromise your emotional equilibrium and your cognitive function.
As we become increasingly reliant on technology, based on the assumption that it makes our lives easier and makes us more efficient (which, of course, it often does), there is a cost: Studies show that the multitasking it permits, compared to doing one task at a time, can hinder productivity and performance. The volume of fragmented activities we try to perform can add to feelings of being overwhelmed. “When we wake up in the morning feeling like we don’t have enough time to get it all done, the brain shifts to a state of chronic stress that hijacks our energy and attention,” notes Heidi Hanna, PhD, fellow and Advisory Board Member of the American Institute of Stress. Technology also can be a perpetual source of distraction, thanks to the beeping, chiming, vibrating, or flashing notifications that divert our attention from what we were doing to check our phones or computers.
And what happens when the digital devices we depend on stop working properly? We’re often at an utter loss, maybe even in a panic, about how to cope or function. Think about it: If your laptop crashes and you haven’t backed up your files recently, weeks’ worth of work could go down the drain. If you lose internet service and can’t send emails or important documents, you may have a hard time continuing to communicate with colleagues or make progress on your work. When your mobile phone dies and you no longer have access to a navigation aid, how will you get to your intended destination? Who or how will you call for help? Do you even remember important phone numbers so you can call the right people from another phone to get directions? These forms of technostress can take an insidious toll on our well-being.
The exponential growth in the use of social media in recent years isn’t doing our emotional equilibrium any favors, either. Staying in touch with people via Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter isn’t a sufficient substitute for connecting with people in person. Research has found that adults aged nineteen to thirty-two, who have the highest use of social media, are twice as likely to feel socially isolated as those with the lowest use. This may be because people who spend so much time fixated on their digital devices have fewer opportunities for in-person interactions. Plus, seeing the real-life activities that others are (or appear to be) engaged in can give them a whopping case of FOMO (fear of missing out) or cause them to struggle with comparisons that leave them feeling as if they’re not measuring up.
Either way, the results can be similar, leading to a profound sense of loneliness/inadequacy/alienation that feels like a dull emotional ache. Ironically, a 2018 online survey of 20,000 adults nationwide found that nearly 50 percent of people sometimes or always feel alone or left out, and 43 percent feel their relationships are not meaningful. Only 53 percent of the participants say they have meaningful face-to-face social interactions with friends or family members on a daily basis.
Then there are the hidden opportunity costs. Spending endless hours staring at digital devices has made us strangers in our own land—disconnected, even alienated, from the natural world. The collateral damage from this disconnect is that we lose our senses of awe and wonder along the way. Awe doesn’t come easily when we’re fighting our way through traffic, struggling to keep up with a burgeoning mountain of work, or reading about the latest national or international crisis. But it’s a singularly effective state that restores us emotionally, socially, and spiritually. In a series of studies, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that after having experiences that evoked awe, prosocial behavior increased among participants—that is, they were more likely to be generous and show concern for ethical behaviors. The experience of awe also decreases our sense of entitlement.
One way or another, we all can learn to put ourselves back in the driver’s seat so we can guide our emotional well-being in the right direction. By unpacking your emotional pain and turmoil so you can see its component parts, you’ll gain greater self-knowledge and awareness and be able to figure out the specific steps you should take to address your personal triggers. You can calm the emotional turmoil inside you by taming your thoughts and tension, engaging in regular physical exercise, promoting good gut health, and making more conscious choices about the ways you choose to live. These are straightforward, down-to-earth remedies for emotional inflammation, and while they’re not necessarily easy to make habitual, they are simple to initiate. The unfortunate truth is this: We have been depriving ourselves of natural remedies that are readily available, and we don’t even realize it.
But here’s some more good news: A blend of cutting-edge research and aggregated lessons from various disciplines (including different forms of sensory therapy, nature therapy, and possibility therapy), featured in the RESTORE plan (see part 2), will help you design your own approach to reversing emotional inflammation. When you improve your state of mind, shift your body’s internal balance in a healthier direction, and reconnect with positive forces in the world around you, it’s a truly uplifting, revitalizing feeling. As Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously suggested, happiness and social harmony come with self-knowledge and self-mastery—and when you use this idea to regain your emotional equilibrium, you’ll be able to grow and thrive in new ways that you didn’t even know existed. But it’s an inside job—because it needs to start with you.